Popular Culture Review Vol. 2, No. 2, July 1991 | Page 67

Displaced People and the
Frailty of Words
No urge seemed stronger to me than that for
communication with others. If the never-completed
movement of communication succeeds with but a single
human being, everything is achieved.
—Karl Jaspers
"Existenzphilosophie"
Contemporary films about difficult parent-child relationships
often rely on a series of semiological puzzles, as the characters who
solve the riddles gain love and self-awareness and those who fail to
solve them face estrangement and self-doubt. In popular film
dialogue, the viewer must deal with a post-Deconstructionist world
in which language is simultaneously unreliable and richly suggestive.
To some extent, the failure of communication lies in the nature of the
tools we all employ. As T. S. Eliot writes in "Burnt Norton" (The Four
Quartets):
Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still.(1)
In a discussion of the poetics of language, Gerard Genette writes
that the "'perfect' or 'supreme' language does not exist, or if it exists,
it is elsewhere; perhaps the 'good language' is always that of our
neighbors.”(2) Poetry, he says, exists only to "repair and compensate"
for the defects in language: "If a language were perfect, poetry would
have no reason for being, since it would have nothing to repair. Lan
guage itself would be a poem and poetry would be everywhere.. ."(3)
The longing for words that will do justice to one's feelings and beliefs
remains unsatisfied, as we shall discover through a brief study of