The American god of words

By Manuel Talens

Editorial comment: Last October I had the privilege of speaking  to the people of the beautiful city of La Victoria in Town Square, La Victoria, Venezuela (pop. 130,000 about an hour west of Caracas). The title of my 2-part presentation was Global Corporate Empire and the American Dream. In this address, I corrected those who referred to the United States as "America" and those who called me an "Americano". I reminded them that the United States is not "American" at all! Rather, I explained, the United States is no more or less than a large, powerful European colony which happens to be located in the "Americas". I then pointed to the ground beneath the outdoor stage on which I spoke and declared, "This is America! We are in America right now!" In his essay below, Manuel Talens elucidates and informs our use and misuse of names and their importance. It is worthy of a careful reading. His essay reminds me of a line in the opening stanza in the Tao te' Ching: "The name that can be spoken is not the constant name". - Les Blough, Editor

�In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning�. As such, in a so semiotic way, commences the gospel of John. The three others, Matthew�s, Mark�s and Luke�s, are less imaginative and, because of that, exegesis attributes them less literary value in comparison to the masterpiece by the author of Revelation. John, who was an educated man and a magnificent novelist avant la lettre, did not hesitate to affirm that being begins with the word, for without the word nothing exists, because any real or fictional entity, any object or any idea needs to be named in order to proceed through that space we call life.

But names are not chosen at random and belong to the category of unconscious codes, as Lacanian psychoanalysts, so devout of the concealed meaning of language, have established. One of them, the French Aldo Naouri, tells in his book M�res et filles the case of a Parisian young man who ran out of the factory he was going to inherit slamming the door behind him, because he could not stand the way in which his father �an inveterate racist� treated the Maghrebian personnel. Later, the young man had a daughter, whose name, Houria, described perfectly the above mentioned breaking out with the past: Houria in Arabic means �independence.� Another amusing case was that of a woman who endured colds all her life. Incidentally she called her son Geffroy, who in French means phonetically �I�m cold.�

And now, once I have set the premises of my exposition I will centre on the name of a country that recently was the object of fierce debates in the cyber exchanges of a plurinacional forum of translation to which I belong. I am referring to The United States of America, alias America. Yes, the citizens of The United States call America their own country and, as a consequence, they call themselves �Americans�, despite the fact that America is a whole continent with more than thirty countries, big and small, that might claim the same right to this appellation. We are therefore facing a flagrant case of undue and unilateral appropriation of a common name, something that rhetorically speaking we might qualify as synecdoche or metonymy, that is, the transfer of meaning from a term that designates a whole to only one of its parts.

Conscious of such nonsense, an Argentinian called Emilio Stevanovich �the youngest interpreter in the history of the UN� coined during the cold war years the assignation �The United States of North America,� but it had little success, since it leads to a new equally illicit metonimia: that of calling its nationals �North Americans�. It suffices to have a glimpse of any atlas to see that in North America, besides The United States, also �exist� Canada and Mexico, likewise North Americans.

In one of Jean-Luc Godard�s last movies, �loge de l�amour, which is a lucid and merciless exercise on memory, the film maker establishes clearly that The United States has stolen its name. In the scene that most impressed me we see a Hollywood lawyer presenting an old Jewish couple the contract to acquire the film rights of their vicissitudes during the Second World War French Resistance. He reads it in English and an interpreter translates for the family. At the point in which he says that the buyers are American, the couple�s granddaughter �an activist against liberal globalization� interrupts him: �What Americans?� 

�From The United States,� answers the surprised attorney.

�But the Brazilian states are also The United States,� replies the young woman.

�Of the United States of the North,� continues the lawyer.

�The Mexicans are also in the North and they are The United States of Mexico. The problem is that you have neither name nor memory.�

A few scenes later, in an extraordinary counterpoint, we learn that the couple, whose original family name was Samuel, had a name indeed�Baillard�a name that they assumed during the war and continued to maintain because they did not want to forget it.

Of course, the users of the America metonymy do not even think about the disruption caused by their deceit, but in the boundaries of the empire many people have tried to remedy this semantic obstacle. The terms �Yankee� or �Gringo� could had served, but they are spoken contemptuously among us �others�, as is the malevolent �Usano� �which means �from the USA� in Spanish, but is dangerously close to �gusano� (worm)� suggested by the late Spanish journalist Julio Camba.

Finally, it appeared as the designation �estadounidense� (the Mexicans spell it �estadunidense� and the French have shyly begun to use �tasunien), that seems to be more neutral, but the arrangement is far from being perfect, since the official name of the former New Spain (Mexico) is Estados Unidos Mexicanos and, at least theoretically, the grandsons of Cuauhtemoc are also full right �estadunidenses�.

The complications do not end here, because not only do the citizens of The United States lack a name �something in itself a serious problem�, but the binomial �United States� is not a name in strict sense either. In general, all countries have a clearly identifiable appellative �Australia, Gabon or Venezuela, for the sake of mentioning three at random� and nobody uses strange circumlocutions at the moment of naming them. In official documents one says �French Republic� or �Kingdom of Morocco� and there is no confusion between these legal appellations and their common assignations as France or Morocco. On the other hand, a name as absurd as The United States of America has needed the creation of abbreviations. In English it is USA. What about in Spanish? The discussion in the forum to which I was referring began when we tried to unify the Spanish spelling of the abbreviation in order to establish editing criteria of a newly created electronic magazine. Then we realized the confusion in which the question has gotten entangled, since among the Spanish newspapers El Pa�s recommends EE UU �two pair of separated letters and no periods�, El Mundo uses EEUU �one block and no periods�, ABC and La Vanguardia follow the academic EE.UU. �one block with two periods� and the Manuel Seco�s Dictionary of doubts and difficulties of the Spanish language writes EE. UU. �two pair of separated letters plus periods�, whereas the Manual of urgent Spanish by the EFE News Agency prefers EUA (Estados Unidos de America) and a rapid navigation through the Net allows us to see that, for instance, the Mexican newspaper La Reforma uses EU and the Chilean El Mercurio writes indistinctly either EEUU or EE.UU. To choose in such conditions is equivalent to a lottery.

A last possibility suggested very recently to me by a colleage would be to renounce any foreing translation of this country�s English abreviation and to refer to it by the name of its citizens, who would be �usamericanos�, that is, �Americans from the USA�. That would cut short once and for all both the original metonymy and the above mentioned discordances. 

It is clear that at this point in history, and in view of the political planetary weight of The United States, we are facing an insoluble problem, useful for linguistic analysis but lacking a solution. But what so many discrepancies really suggest is the troubled relation of us peripheral to this nation that from the beginning of the 20th Century self-assumed the role of Universe�s gendarme.

Let�s return to Lacan, for whom nothing in words is due to chance: if it was true that we all are what either the surname or the first name that we carry dictates, some patronymics heavy loaded with sense would stamp a character to their carriers. For example, Fidel Castro has remained �faithful� (the word �fidel� means that in Spanish) to a few postulates that block to him the possibility of any deviation; his family name, from the Latin castrum (�camp�) the origin of the Castilian military term �castrense,� reminds me the school times when we used to translate long fragments of Julius Caesar�s The Gallic War. I suppose that by this time someone should have already indicated these details about the Cuban leader, which seem to me of crystalline evidence: I am sure that he was predestined to be an inflexible soldier and that his initial Law studies were only a fleeting detour.

Let�s see a second example, this one quite hilarious: Jacques Chirac, the current French President, installed a circuit of lavatories in the streets of Paris for relief of pedestrians when he was mayor.. They were luxurious and one could access them in exchange for a few coins. Who knows that if, in spite of himself, he just accomplished unconsciously the destiny of his family name �at least many people understood it this way�, since in colloquial French both Chirac�s syllables complement eschatology (the verb chier means �to have a shit�) and economy (the verb raquer means �to pay�), in such a way that just a few days after the inaugurating of the lavatories the French people joyfully repeated a humorous slogan born in the street: Avec Chirac, tu chies et tu raques, that is to say, �with Chirac you have a shit and you pay.�

It is not so strange to find road engineers whose names are Bridge or with dermatologists called Skin and so on. All of them �always according to Lacan� chose a profession dictated by their family names. Likewise, the country America (that is, its political machinery, not its citizenry, despite the fact that contamination between both exists) includes in the DNA of its State chromosomes the essence of the predator it has been since in 1787; it initiated its journey pillaging a name which belonged to many and, later, imposed the mercantilist language of both its entertainment industry and its multinationals, either willingly or unwillingly.

Who could have said to John that his gospel�s god of fiction, that one whose metaphor was the Word, would come to life many centuries later, would adopt the name of the continent in which it is placed and, from the �oval� office of a white house �embryonic simile of the founding egg�, would create a new world order �thus imitating the first verse of Genesis: �In In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth�� and would put it to its service through the control of both telecommunications and propaganda, that is to say, of words. 

� Copyright 2006 by AxisofLogic.com