Literary Writing and Linguistic Disalienation

In Geogre Orwell’s 1984 (1948), literary writing is the last stronghold against “Newspeak” where the latter represents the limit point of the hypothesis concerning the homologation of reality. In a homologated world everything is subject to control by those responsible for social planning, consequently for communication-production in a world where the nonfunctional and the superfluous have been eliminated. But Newspeak can translate anything except for Shakespeare, Swift, Sterne…in other words, literature. So it will only enter into force and become law in 2050. In his Lezioni Americane (Six Memos for the Next Millenium, 1988), the Italian writer Italo Calvino (1923-1985) considers the gaze of literature as the “possibility of health” against the “pestilence” that has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty. A “plague in language” which manifests itself as homologation, automatism, levelling, not only of verbal expression, but also of life itself and even of the imagination and of desire: “At this point, I don’t wish to dwell upon the possible sources of this epidemic, whether they are to be sought in politics, ideology, beaurocratic uniformity, the monotony of mass-media, or the way the schools dispense the culture of the mediocre. What interests me are the possibilities of health. Literature, and perhaps literature alone, can create the antibodies to fight this plague in language”. Literary writing disalienates language which is generally compromised by the “Order of discourse”, made functional to dominant communication and reduced therefore to the mere status of “communicative language”. Literature enables us to see in verbal language what in the direct word of verbal language is not possible to capture: that is, the other word, not only the word of the other, but also the other voices that resound in the word of the “same” subject