Opus Ignotum
Abstract
“Vocibus concide,” Ennius commanded, in the single line of an otherwise lost work preserved in Varro’s De lingua latina: “With words destroy him.” Not even Ennius’ context did Varro record, only the imperative that an unknown man be crushed by language. But for the transgressive, derogatory, or slanderous speech which might incite destructive or violent action, seldom do we conceptualize language as somatically harmful. Yet, automatically and often carelessly we daily shoulder language’s immensurable heft, oblivious to its disastrous potentiality, to paraphrase Chuck McGill, like chimps with machine guns. Language scares. Language intimidates. It stokes our most flammable insecurities, enforces self-exclusion, delimits thought, expression, and communication. Its very fumes intoxicate; a sprawling diatribe might be as incendiary as the utterance of a single word—harmless phonemes, sounds joined together like beads on a string. Language is, of course, also beautiful, constructive, and inspiriting beyond all sense imaginable. But language’s boon is not, for now, the object of what follows. No, what follows is two-thirds of a story answering Ennius’ solemn command, its target one Solomon T. Faolainn. The following eight chapters amount to a keelhauling, dragging Solomon’s troubled mind through the abyss of language, where against the jagged inner matrices of myth, religion, and history it is pulverized and reduced to its rawest elements—made ready, effectively, to be reforged. Such matters need not be all seriousness, though; where in the guidebooks of literature does it say that witnessing destruction cannot, on occasion, be fun?
Table of Contents
Abstract -- Critical introduction -- Mense -- Appendix
Degree
M.F.A. (Master of Fine Arts)