Of Idiolects and Stories

 

        Hablot Browne, "Esther Summerson at her desk"

In some of the sweetest words I have ever received, I awoke one morning to a message from a dear friend telling me that in my voice he heard that of Esther Summerson, Dickens' heroine of Bleak House. Along with his message, my friend – a librarian and thus complete in his references- gave me this quote as example:

It was all gone now, I remembered, getting up from the fire. It was not for me to muse over bygones, but to act with a cheerful spirit and a grateful heart. 

-- Esther Summerson, Charles Dickens. Bleak House. London: Bradbury & Evans. 1853. p. 57.

I like to think my heart is grateful, my spirit cheerful. There is much to be grateful for and cheerful about in my present life, if not my more distant past, that will catch up to me (though less often now what with storebought serotonin), still from time to  time. Melancholy is a nasty beast however and does what it will to inflect those qualities over to darkness when and how it can.

Further to that, it also touched me in that Esther is, like myself, another abandoned child. This is, of course, no surprise for a Dickens protagonist, nor is it for literature in general. From Superman to to Oedipus, to Cosette, the foundling child is an archetype that fascinates the larger world in their entertainment, if not in reality (I had a coworker tell me once that abandoned/adopted children were the detritus of society since even their own mother couldn't stand them). 

My writing, therefore finding that “voice,” has been an integral part of finding a home, a story of my own. Seen from the inside, Jeannette Winterson puts it in her memoir (whose title is taken from words her adopted mother spoke to her) Why Be Happy When You Can Be Normal:

Adopted children are self-invented because we have to be; there is an absence, a void, a question mark at the very beginning of our lives. A crucial part of our story is gone, and violently, like a bomb in the womb. The baby explodes into an unknown world that is only knowable through some kind of a story — of course that is how we all live, it’s the narrative of our lives, but adoption drops you into the story after it has started. It’s like reading a book with the first few pages missing. It’s like arriving after curtain up. The feeling that something is missing never, ever leaves you — and it can’t, and it shouldn’t, because something is missing.

That isn’t of its nature negative. The missing part, the missing past, can be an opening, not a void. It can be an entry as well as an exit. It is the fossil record, the imprint of another life, and although you can never have that life, your fingers trace the space where it might have been, and your fingers learn a kind of Braille.

Like Ms. Winterson my own story, the adoption itself and then the events following, is haunted by trauma and therein lies why I crossed a sea to find a new home, and in turn adopted a home for myself in gaining citizenship here, even adopted entirely a different language. For many and many a year I refused to speak English, much like in the stories of mute children who -for reasons of dire mistreatment- refuse to speak at all. I would speak, yes, but exclusively in French. Only long after, quite literally decades later, could I return to my “mother tongue” face it, live inside of it once again. Creation in it took another decade or thereabouts.

This has left traces on my writing and my speaking. One criticism I have received is that it sounds like I’m writing a translation of myself, though I assure my audience that this is the voice that comes to me naturally, however artificial it may to some appear. 

In fact the remarks connecting me to Esther Summerson took place within the context of a long conversation concerning “idiolects” – these idiosyncratic usages of language specific to each user that somehow manage nonetheless to communicate beyond the strict circle of the self. If decades of a French-speaking existence have left their mark on my speech and writing patterns, so be it. It is part of that biography, that story that I refused to leave at the void of my birth and the implosion of blank violence, the erasure of self that was my original reliquishment, and the far worse violence that followed.

I cannot be as entirely sanguine as Esther as, since she wrote those words, Faulkner has also written that "the past is never over, it isn't even past." Bygones are never entirely gone by. Hence I write of ghosts in an idiolect I hope will speak to others, however tinged with a foreign accent - but I do so, even in the midst of a native tendency to melancholy, with a cheerful and grateful heart.