Notes Toward a Theory
Language weighs exactly as much as it is prepared to answer for
A note to myself, before the thought escapes, as thoughts of this kind so reliably do.
Begin again from the beginning: what is register, really, once we strip away the textbook definitions that have never quite satisfied me?
Not merely formality, the tuxedo-and-jeans model, though that is where every account starts and, lazily, stops.
Register is a relationship, no, a negotiation, between a speaker and a truth, conducted in the presence of a listener who is also being negotiated with.
(Three parties, then, always: the sayer, the said, the one spoken to. Note this. It matters more than I can yet show.)
The formal register is not posher language; it is language that has taken on more risk, that has staked more, that stands more visibly answerable.
Consider the difference between I think it might rain and the synoptic conditions indicate a high probability of precipitation.
The second is not smarter; it is more exposed, more falsifiable, more willing to be caught out in error.
Formality, in this light, is not a costume but a contract, and the more formal the phrasing, the larger the deposit of credibility it lays down.
Which would explain why the are so often cowards: they borrow the deposit without ever meaning to repay it.
Pseudo-formality, then: the tuxedo worn to avoid, and not to honour, the occasion. There is a whole rhetoric here I have never named.
Return to the three parties. What happens when one of them collapses into another?
When the said and the sayer merge, in confession, in lyric, in the very diary I am at this moment keeping, register turns inward and the listener becomes a kind of eavesdropped self.
When the sayer and the listener merge, in intimacy, in the letter to a friend, the truth relaxes its guard, and precision gives way to trust.
When the said and the listener merge, in propaganda, in , in the sermon, the truth is bent toward the hearer until it is no longer quite the truth.
(Is this too neat? It is certainly too neat. But neatness at this stage is , not architecture. Keep it, and be ready to burn it.)
The word that keeps returning, , is , Bakhtin's word, though I mean something narrower and more grammatical by it than he did.
To be answerable is to have chosen, in advance, the before which one's sentence will be tried.
The scholar answers to evidence; the poet, to feeling; the , to no one, which is precisely why his language, though loud, is .
Weightlessness. That may be the key term I have been circling for months without daring to land on.
Language weighs exactly as much as it is prepared to be held responsible for, and not one gram more.
Test this against the cases: the hedge that lightens, the boast that inflates, the plain statement that, precisely because it risks everything, weighs most of all.
So the theory, if it is even one, reduces to a single, embarrassingly simple claim.
Every choice of register is a choice of how much to weigh, how much of oneself to place, visibly, on the scale.
Say it more carefully tomorrow. Say it worse first, then better; the thought must be allowed to be before it is allowed to be right.
(Reminder: do not publish this. The moment it becomes an argument for others, it will begin protecting itself, and I will lose the one virtue these notes possess, their willingness to be wrong.)
And yet the very temptation to publish is itself data, for even here, alone, the sayer is already dressing for an audience he pretends not to have.
There is no purely private register. I have suspected this for years and resisted it, and the resistance, I see now, was the proof.
Enough for tonight; the candle, metaphorically and otherwise, is low.
But mark this sentence, whichever way the theory finally turns: to write anything down at all is to decide how much of the truth one is prepared to be answerable for, even to oneself, especially to oneself.