You will be my friend! Unless you are a character in the children’s book titled the very same phrase, you likely see this declaration as hasty and inelegant, a juvenile way of putting cart before horse. “You need to get to know me first,” you might caution. “It takes time to know someone well enough to call them a friend.” We never know anyone well enough for that, though, regardless of how long we have spent hovering around them like a puny little rock in Saturn’s orbit, how many times we have walked the same elm-lined path to their front door.
In fact, we have no good way of proving that we know anyone. I can list off a thousand little facts about my childhood best friend, but they form a word cloud in the shape of a person, certainly not flesh and blood. I can draw a picture of my mother, however elemental my artistic talents may be, but the paper, less than a millimeter thick, will never form a three-dimensional figure. Words of all things certainly lack the power to conjure themselves into a message, as might any other form of symbolic representation. We may be able to place an emoji where we would usually just smile ourselves, but a word or an image will never encompass the joy of getting into high school or the despair I saw in my father on the morning of my uncle’s funeral. A celebrity whose parents were immigrants to the United States may be heralded as a representation of the American Dream, but such a statement excludes whole swaths of their personality and dilutes both the signifier and the signified down to weak, one-dimensional paper dolls of ideas and people. Our knowledge of one another revolves around our ability to use symbolic representation to express ourselves and to understand the world, yet these symbols are hopelessly flawed.
The use of people as stand-ins for ideas both puts forth a single understanding of the idea and boils the person down to a concept they may not even comprehend, a natural consequence of the complexity of consciousness. In Haruki Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, Kafka, a runaway who chronicles his adventures with robotic and meticulous detail (and has newly named himself after Franz Kafka, naturally), remarks while looking at the cover of an album that Miss Saeki, the woman who recorded it, “looks like a symbol of something”: whether an historical era or a theme, she instantiates the existence of something far more important than herself. By reducing people to their symbolic value, though, Kafka denies her existence as a person and makes her consciousness ever more impossible to understand. Attempting to connect people to a web of ideas still fails to incorporate any of what makes a person human and transcends ideas expressible through language.
While a word may conjure an emotion, it cannot replicate the individual experience of that emotion, nor can any descriptor adequately explain the consciousness of another. Jane Eyre (1847) poses much the same question: Charlotte Brontë’s titular character becomes fodder for theological interpretation as not one, not two, but three separate characters in the novel each see her as symbolic of whatever they see as evil. At various points in Jane’s young life, Mrs Reed, St John, and Mr Brocklehurst all envision her as wicked and demonic the moment she does not do their bidding, allowing her to become a flattened archetype in their eyes. Mr Brocklehurst, proprietor of the boarding school where she has spent her formative years, insists that Jane is “a little castaway,” a “servant and agent” of the Evil One (Brontë, 78). That he immediately jumps to using her as a symbol of the theological battle against evil that every Lowood student must fight indicates that he simply cannot perceive the complexity of her personality. While we the readers see Jane’s struggle to do the right thing and be a good person and are aware of her internal monologue, which twists and turns and presses on, the people around her simplify her personality into an unrecognizable explanation of the self. The rooms and rooms within her consciousness, no matter how full and complex, require a key that only she possesses, and so nobody around her can properly understand her.
Nakata, the other principal character of Kafka on the Shore, meets the same problem: his mind, fundamentally different and in many ways simpler than those of the people around him, defies communication through language. The syntax of his speech is simple, albeit stilted—he frequently refers to himself in the third person and uses almost exclusively single independent clauses—yet it causes him to appear to be merely developmentally disabled and prevents his consciousness from being properly understood. Nakata, who lacks both memory and the ability to communicate through written language, confronts the inadequacy of words for expressive and descriptive purposes even more acutely than we do; while I searched for the word “acutely” for two minutes while writing this essay, my command of the English language having briefly escaped me, he would be incapable of defining it, let alone typing it into a word processor. The brief separation of his consciousness from his body left him “floating,” his command of language detached from the material world, exacerbating the mismatch between the capabilities of language and his perception of what exists around him (Murakami, 255). Consciousness exists nearly totally detached from the reality of our engagement with one another, making it impossible for any two people to truly know one another or for a human to be properly representative of anything else.
Not only do people fail to represent concepts, but I believe that concepts also fail to represent people; the two realms of the material and abstract fall victim to an eternal and mutual disconnect. As the scholar Eric Lindstrom wrote about Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, the great pitfall of free indirect discourse lies in its inability to convey the inner workings of the mind whose train of thought it purports to replicate. Free indirect discourse produces the illusion of consciousness, Lindstrom believes: “where the obstruction and unavailability of another person’s inner life often structures the problem for reality beyond novels, within Austen’s narrative art there is a premise of availability” (Lindstrom, 1078). Yet this availability is confined to the fictional realm and represents a far-from-realistic engagement with another’s consciousness. The use of the words “sense” and “sensibility” to describe sisters Elinor and Marianne cannot encompass their being or adequately express the subtle differences between their personalities; Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his Philosophical Investigations that rather than the word “pain” meaning crying—its common physical manifestation—“the verbal expression of pain replaces crying and does not describe it” (Wittgenstein, §244). Labels stand in for the material realm as our connection to the objects themselves disappears, as we resort to a crumbling reliance on language and abandon the physical reality in front of us.
The Buendías of Gabriel García Márquez’s sweeping, lively One Hundred Years of Solitude contract a strange and novel form of insomnia, passing it throughout the young city of Macondo like the latest churchyard gossip. This insomnia taints your every moment, wresting reality from your grasp; you forget the names of your chickens, the word for the kitchen pot which has already boiled over from neglect, and the identity of your own child. Jose Arcadio Buendía, ever the visionary, attaches small notecards to just about everything in an attempt to salvage the town’s daily routine at least, but these notecards grow in length, suddenly encompassing purpose and practical use as well as simple name-to-object labeling. Just as Wittgenstein writes, words very literally replace the action, the purpose, and the object, making language the only lens through which reality is even remotely approachable or comprehensible. The insomnia does not stop there, though: they go on “living in a reality that [is] slipping away, momentarily captured by words, but which [will] escape irremediably when they [forget] the values of the written letters” (Márquez, 47). Words trickle out of their fragile little brains, followed by the alphabet, followed by the notion of language itself. Any attempt to use words to reconstruct reality can disappear at any time, the fragmentation of language so easily prompted as to render communication an immense privilege. However, these simpler lives are tragic for their lack of memory, not necessarily their lack of language.
The devastation of Márquez’s narrative lies in the scrambling of human personalities: characters with whom we have lived for dozens of pages signing themselves over to “the irremediable forgetfulness of the heart,” entire generations of a family losing touch with their forebears and their descendants; our investment in these people produces the profound loss we feel at watching them forget their misbegotten connections to one another (Márquez, 48). While Miss Saeki’s symbolizing “something” may have been a harmful oversimplification, worse yet is the idea of a person symbolizing nothing, only an abyss in the shape of a stick figure. This may well be because they did not know each other in the first place, and so language has made little difference in their relationship to the world. The use of objects takes precedence for sure, as does José Arcadio’s understanding of how to keep his ever-disappointed wife happy or young Amaranta’s knowledge that she will always live in the shadow of newcomer Rebeca; words serve to describe these understandings, but they had already done so imperfectly. Language’s disappearance marks a flash point in the regression of “civilization,” one where the residents of Macondo cease to have any way of communicating even the jagged shards of their souls. Words and symbols had mattered before because they allowed the Buendías and the Moscotes, the Terneras and the Iguaráns, to even attempt to know one another.
If language feeds like a winding tape of meaningless drivel out of our mouths and into the air, representative of an invisible consciousness, we at least need it as some medium for our thoughts to be passed along from mind to mind. Unfortunately, telepathy will not work for you and me, regardless of how intently I stare you down; I will do a better job of explaining that complete and sufficient communication of ideas through language is impossible if I simply communicate these ideas to you through language and hope you can pick up the slack. In the preface to his 1921 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein wrote that his work would “perhaps only be understood by those who have themselves already thought the thoughts which are expressed in it”; in any other case, the limitations of language would prevent his readers from fully comprehending his ideas (Wittgenstein, 3). I feel the need to take a leaf from Wittgenstein’s book right now, as many of us do, albeit unwittingly, every day, and warn that my train of thought is difficult to understand if you do not have some window into my consciousness, just as yours, whoever you are, would make little sense to me. We all must trust our readers and our friends to honestly and authentically try to understand us, even when that trying inevitably comes to nothing.
In a world where language fails us, we remain dependent on it and thus cannot give up on it—finding the perfect word, explaining a situation or a story to the best of our abilities, attempting to know the people around us even as they are fundamentally still strangers. I asked someone to be my friend the other day with little preface; surprisingly enough, it went well. Of course, this “someone” was a pigeon I met underneath a bridge on the way to the commuter rail, and a teenager would have looked at me like I was insane, but perhaps we should all be a bit more like the pigeons of the world. At the very least, we should put our faith in the knowledge that words will someday bring us closer to knowing one another, regardless of whether we can ever truly call anyone a friend.
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