Whether railing against literary theories or the literary works in which they are realized, Julien Benda graces rhetoric with a proof per absurdum. His intention is, in effect, to show that our modern literature, incapable of conforming to rules and conventions, stuck in raw emotion, the purely carnal, and the individual—that its verbal orientation toward concrete particulars is analogous to "primitive" languages like the language of the Hurons, who have one word for eating rice, another for eating meat, another for eating fruit, and so on, but not one single word meaning to eat, nor words for infinite or absolute, and exhibit likewise a most peculiar lack of general ideas. To this, Benda opposes the faculty of abstraction: "the human race's great title to nobility," such as Rhetoric offers it to us.
The common thesis in which Benda participates here, and might well find sociologists to sustain it, is all too plain, its falsity easy to spot. After all—no less than modern writers—primitives have their own abstract ideas that are not ours (among which it is sufficient to name taboo, mana, and wakan). The primitive has then the right to say: "The French have ten words [for 'chicken']: poussin, poulet, poule, coq, and so on, where I have only one, akoho. What a pitifully concrete language! What a lack of abstract wit!"
"But," the Frenchman will say, "I have a concept of the species, even if I lack the word."
"And what makes you so sure I lack the concept of eating?" the Huron will reply.
The illusion that Benda obeys here is what I'll call the myth or mirage of concrete languages. It is the same illusion that causes foreign language, argot and technical usage to seem more "lively" and imagistic than our own, to the degree that they are foreign. (And indeed, it is upon their concrete side that we stumble first.)
"Julien Benda, or the Myth of Concrete Languages" (1953)
by Jean Paulhan
