Dialogue among Civilizations through Poetry

Dialogue among Civilizations through Poetry 

“To what extend the dialogue as an exchange of speech acts truly represents a meaningful practice in our daily interactions?”

A critical approach to the spirit of the event. (OXFORD, 2000)

By Erminia Passannanti

 “The knowledge we have of, at least, one language”, says Chomsky, “is partly innate and partly learned.” When we acquired our own languages, we were put in the condition to enter, in a non-conscious way, the intricate network of our cultural background, indispensable to grow to be meaningful speakers. By entering the richness of our civilizations through the use of language, we are also induced (and forced) to contribute to it by means of our factual need to communicate thoughts, plans, tastes, judgments and feelings to others. Thus, we experience dialogue as a functional social habit, as suggested by the Greek diálogos, which etymologically refers to a sheer verbal exchanges of speech acts: “speech (logos) among (diá) people”. We might also add that the mental attitude we adopt depends greatly upon the quality of the effort we make to interact with the others, in our endless hunt for satisfaction.

However, given all the difficulties we experience in living our lives, the task of achieving a sincere style of dialoguing may sound quite optimistic and unrealistic. Fated to wear a “mask” - Pirandello noticed in his play 6 Characters in Search of an author - we end by becoming mediocre performers of a set of formulaic acts of speech. Pirandello shows what the world of our day-to-day relationships becomes, when deprived of order, freedom and creativeness. The “six characters”, while accusing Pirandello himself for having written a pedestrian script and looking, on a meta-theatrical level, for better roles, on a human level, are simply searching for authenticity. They wish to be freed from their masks which make them interact with each other in a false and insincere manner, like marionettes. This is because, they stress, the author has exceedingly informed the play with his ideology, annihilating individual psychological and linguistic traits, relegating them to a condition of incommunicability and isolation. The “six characters” claim that they would be more capable of convincingly representing their roles if set free by the stage director who acts as a sort of medium between the author, his text and the actors. Moved to compassion, the director does grant them permission to offer their personal interpretation of Pirandello’s play. But when the “six characters” perform on the stage the new version of the drama, it proves to be equally a failure, because of the vanity, inexperience and conflicting fashion of the actors’ individual behaviour. Pirandello’s pessimistic idea is that, no matter how we struggles in defense of our real “essence”, the mask imposed on us by society and the mechanical language we are given become our real self, behind which we find a tabula rasa, rather than the active mind imbued with such innate acumen as conceived by Chomsky. In Pirandello’s modernist poetics, men are condemned to misinterpret each other, deviate the message they receive and be themselves inadequate producers of significant communicative outputs. But is his message a purely pessimistic one? Obviously, he is putting on trial the idea of the “dialogue” itself,  undermining the very core of its possibility and worth. It comes as no surprise that in his theatre, communication, as a concept, is systematically ridiculed. Yet, people start sensing its need and feeling uncomfortable with its deficiency, as they are made bitterly to laugh at the pathetic attempts at dialogue of the “six characters”, fatally entrapped in their fixed roles, warped by their pride and antagonism. Such a typically pirandellian sardonic gloom cast on men’s nonsensical and solipsistic nature does not, in fact,  undermine the importance of the search for authenticity. It serves, indeed, both as a reduction ad absurdum of the view that we simply speak a private language which is hardly communicable and a way to reflect upon the actual possibilities to achieve a truly dialogic civilization.

Even more significant, under a critical point of view,” are Ionesco’s meta-linguistic plays such as Amédée , The Bald Primadonna or Frenzy for Two and Beckett’s Krapp’s last Tape and Endgame, which all address the absurdity of some acts of speech when uttered in the form of a conversation emptied of the will to communicate.  In Ionesco’s The Bald Prima Donna , the scene is set in a typical old-fashioned English living room in a London suburb where the two dialoguing characters, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, are having their friends Mr. and Mrs. Martin at home for a typically English social evening. It is worth noticing the vertiginously uncommunicative quality of their paradoxical discussion. And, in fact, seated around a table to play a game of whist, the four characters talk to each other in a entirely formulaic fashion:

Mrs. Martin: I can buy a pocketknife for my brother, but you could not buy Ireland for your grandfather.

Mr. Smith: One walks on one’s feet, but one keeps warm with the aid of coal and electricity.

Mr. Martin: Sell a pig today, eat an egg tomorrow.

Mrs. Smith: In life you’ve got to look out of the window.

Mrs. Martin: You may sit down on the chair, when the chair hasn’t any.

Mr. Smith: One can always be in two places at once.

Mr. Martin: The floor is below us and the ceiling is above.

Mrs. Smith: When I say “yes”, it is only a manner of speaking.

Mrs. Martin: We all have our cross to bear.

Mr. Smith: Describe a circle, stroke its back and it turns vicious.

The play comes to an end with a sequence of meaningless sentences that are utterly lifted from a typical English language textbook for foreign learners.

In Endgame, Beckett too poses the problem of unmasking the futile practice of our everyday verbal exchanges, with the chess play being symbolic of a mute form of dialogue. Indeed, for the author , “it is the shape what matters” (Beckett is quoting from Saint Augustine), therefore, what matters are the forms that life and art encounter (no matter how absurd and paradoxical), which are created out of the need of establishing a meaningful world with its own laws and demands, as when Hamm, the main character in Endgame, plays his role in front of an imaginary audience and delivers it in a theatrical fashion, mocking the non authentic conduct of people in their communicative endeavours. The need for dialogue is sensed even more dramatically in Beckett ‘s Krapp’s Last Tape, where dialogue is achieved out of a series of recorded monologues, with the same actor playing both roles of old Krapp and young Krapp in the attempt of taking control over the “machine” and over his own memory, with the use of a tape-recorder. The spoken action is all condensed in the bizarrely  “dialogic” monologue of the main character, who has constructed a complicated architecture of verbal fragments (recorded and/or in progress) to establish a communication between his past and his dismembered present. As in this case, soliloquy might subsist, as a choice or a constriction, when a person occasionally (or pathologically) refuses to exchange his views or emotions with others, (the speaking to oneself, which has great impact on the audience when the actor on the stage performs an a parte), but, indeed, it is critical discussion which makes real confrontation probable. 

As for poetry, one can acknowledge the fact that its manifest task is not always communication. It is intimate, at times opaque, highly selective and often synthetic, in the sense of artificial, up to the point that it risks becoming impenetrable. And yet, we might agree, here as in Krapp’s last tape, in describing the lyric poet’s soliloquy as a disguised form of dialogue, the dialogue of the Self with the soul, the dialogue of the soul with its many doubles. There are poetry traditions that confirm this, like the XXth Century Italian “ermetismo” or the poetics behind Joyce’s use of stream of consciousness, which prove poetry and modernist narratives to be willingly rather incommunicative, and yet betraying an inescapable dialogic element. This may have  been a overly extended diversion just to point out the centrality of dialogue in both artistic matters and in real life. But let’s concentrate on what poetry can grant us with, in terms of human exchanges. Here we may turn to the imminent “Dialogue Among Civilizations through Poetry” international event.

The importance of the Internet to facilitate encounters is well known. Surprisingly enough, according to the Lycos search engine, poetry is the eighth most popular subject on the Internet. And poetry is, in fact, benefiting as much as any other subject of such a vast archipelagos of possible contacts and proposals.  Indeed, on the occasion of the 31st Poetry International Festival series of seminars on the relationship between poetry and the cyber culture, (“TOWARDS A WORLD POETRY MAGAZINE ON THE WEB”) the importance of the Poetry International Foundation’s program to set out an international poetry magazine on the World Wide Web was underlined: this  would present contributions from as many countries as possible, in the language of those countries and in English.

Ram Devineni, editor of Rattapallax, and organizer of the program “Dialogue among Civilizations through Poetry”, accomplished on the Internet with the help of poetry net-works, is making a high-quality profit of the mega-structure of the Internet to provide poetry and poets with the most accessible way of achieving closeness and communication. Providing space for the contributors from many different countries, the program of “Dialogue Among Civilizations through Poetry” has created a sort of central agorà, an ideal meeting point for the editors and visitors to get to know each other and work in partnership. Presently, there are 230,000 poetry sites on the web. The Academy of American Poets' site receives 4 million hits a month, which equals 2 million different individuals a year. Bearing these subtle and fascinating realities in mind, the organizers of “Dialogue Among Civilizations” have assembled events worldwide to create a series of poetry readings on the theme of the dialogue, to be understood as an attempt to foster meaningful and fruitful “exchange of ideas”. The various local organizers disseminated all over the world, who are at work under the umbrella of the major event and whose work is still in progress through an intense network of daily interactions through web sites and literary magazines, are increasingly becoming the objects of enthusiastic international attention. The last week of March 2001 will be focused on live readings. The major reading will be held in the United Nations building in New York City. Poetry International-Rotterdam, Rattapallax Press & UNSRC Society of Writers have organized the program in symbiosis. On the 24th of March, Australian poet John Kinsella, editor of Stand and Salt, will host the literary conference at the United Nations, with the co-presence of featured literary journals from all over the world. On March 29, distinguished poet Yusef Komunyakaa, writers Joyce Carol Oates and James Ragan will read their poems at the United Nations headquarters, in New York City. During the same week, 200 poetry readings will take place in over 100 cities worldwide. The event I have organized in Oxford will feature the acclaimed Irish poets Tom Paulin and Bernard O’Donoghue, the Welsh poet Andrew McNeillie, the new French poetess Lucile Desligneres, Peter Dale, myself and the English philosopher Brian R. Clack, author of important critical studies on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of religion, who will speak to reflect on the spirit of the event.

 http://uk.geocities.com/erminia_passannanti/Dialoguepoetry.html 

The criteria for setting an event imply no limit to the number of readings and cities that are willing to participate. The focus is on the over-all theme of dialogue. Organizers have been conferred full control and responsibility for their local happenings. The following is the various offerings at the main site www.poetrydialogue.org where it is possible to find information about the mentioned cross-national poetry events and directory of featured poets involved in the program. While having intensified a number of the existing features of the present post-modern cyber culture, such as unity of intent, web-based enactment of non-hierarchical simultaneity of action, (cyber-conference), Ram Devineni and his partners have developed some even more innovative ideas to bring together the best poetry of the world and help expand the relationship among different literary traditions. In

In cooperation with Rattapallax Press and the “United Nations Society of Writers”, Fictionopolis will publish an anthology e-book of poetry and prose. "The spirit of the project is very much in keeping with our vision of the e-book as a powerful tool for increasing global literacy," says Fictionopolis founder, Adrian Taylor. The free anthology, "Dialogue Among Civilizations Through Poetry" will be available from the Fictionopolis website in a variety of popular formats.

© Erminia Passannanti

Note on the contributor:

Erminia Passannanti is an Italian poet, translator and essayist. She read Modern Languages at The Faculty of Letters and Philosophy of the Salerno University (Italy). She is completing a doctorate at the UCL (London University College) on the poetry of Franco Fortini. Erminia Passannanti will be hosting a remarkable group of European poets in the occasion of the United Nations celebration of The Year of Dialogue among Civilizations through Poetry. She teaches Italian Literature at the St Clare’s College of Oxford.