Afterword

Summary

Jeremiads against the corruption of the word and visions of its redemption have persisted in American culture down to this day. I conclude with two recent versions of the counterpoint between perceptions of the corruption of language and visions of its redemption. The first is from Allen Ginsberg's “Wichita Vortex Sutra,” and the second is from Reverend Tosamah's sermon in N. Scott Momaday's House Made of Dawn. Each passage offers as a remedy for the corruption something different from Emerson's (and Orwell's) prescription to be concrete, to be faithful to things, to stand by words. The poet and storyteller in these two passages are not schoolmasters of the language, seeking to purify the language of the tribe, but counterstaters, envisioning a more creative language, a therapy of verbal music and magic:

The war is language, language abused for Advertisement, language used like magic for power on the planet

Against this black magic, the poet offers his own magic, a spell of words chanted to call forth a vision of transcendence:

I lift my voice aloud, make Mantra of American language now, I here declare the end of the War.

For Cooper, for Thoreau, and now for Momaday, the language of the Native American stands as a rebuke to the language of foreigners to the land. Reverend Tosamah, in the midst of preaching upon the text In principio erat Verbum, comments upon the wasty ways of the contemporary white man's attitude toward words: In the white man's world, language, too – and the way in which the white man thinks of it – has undergone a process of change.