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377 pages, Hardcover
First published July 1, 2015
Bhartihari argued that meaning happens in the act of using language, both in the utterances of the speaker and in the recognition of those utterances by the listener. In implicit agreement with Bhartihari, later theorists of the art of reading suggest that the meaning of the text emerges from the interaction of the text with the reader. ‘Reading,’ wrote Italo Calvino, ‘means approaching something that is just coming into being.’ Bhartihari called this ‘coming into being’ sphota, a term dating back to Panini signifying ‘spoken language’, and in Bhartihari’s theory it defines the act of ‘bursting forth’, spouting, as it were, meaningful sounds. Sphota does not depend on the user’s manner of speaking (or writing, so style or accent is not of the essence) but carries a definite meaning in the particular combination of words in a sentence. This meaning is not reducible to its component parts: only those who have not learned a language properly divide a sentence into words in order to understand it. In most cases, meaning is apprehended by the listener (or the reader) as a whole, in an instantaneous illumination of what is being conveyed. This illumination is conveyed by the sphota, but, Bhartihari argues, it is already present in the hearer’s (or reader’s) brain. In modern terms, the illumination happens when the sphota is received by a brain that is language-ready.
Ulysses, like the other souls in Dante’s Hell, suffers a punishment that he himself has fashioned during his own limited course of his relations with his Maker. In Dante’s imagination, we, not God, are responsible for our actions and for their consequences. Dante’s world is not the world of Homer, where whimsical gods play with our human destinies for their entertainment or private purpose. God, Dante believes, has given each of us certain abilities and possibilities, but also the gift of free will, which allows us to make our own choices and assume the consequences of those choices. Even the quality of the punishment itself is, according to Dante, determined by our transgression. Ulysses is condemned to burn invisibly in the forked flame because his sin, counseling others to practise fraud, is furtive, and since he has committed it through speech, through his tongue, it is in tongues of flame that he is eternally tortured. In Dante’s hell, every punishment has a reason.
But Auschwitz is a very different kind of hell. Soon after [Primo] Levi’s arrival in the midst of a terrible winter, sick with thirst, locked up in a vast, unheated shed, he sees an icicle hanging outside the window. He sticks out a hand and breaks the icicle off, but a guard snatches it from him, throws it away, and pushes Levi back into his place. “Warum?” asks Levi in his poor German, “Why?” “Hier ist keine warum,” the guard replies, “Here there is no why.” This infamous response is the essence of the Auschwitz hell: in Auschwitz, unlike in Dante’s realm, there is no “Why.”