Deborah Eisenberg’s works are often studies in perception of the world. So it is with this story. Told from different perspectives and introduced by epigraphs from Noam Chomsky and Donald Trump, it is also a reflection on language as a phenomenon inextricably linked to contemporary ills: “a way for us to deceive ourselves into believing that we understand things, so then we can just go ahead and do stuff that’s more ruthless than what any other animal does”.
Our relationship with words is overrated, “Merge” suggests. Some of us make “mental objects out of them”, to quote Chomsky; others simply declare, after Trump, “I have the best words”; in any case, speech alone is not enough to give us human status. Language is nothing but “an extremely plastic faculty, amenable to many uses, but it developed to serve the pressing demands of malice, vengefulness, and greed – humanity’s most consistent attributes”. And then, as you keep reading, the very language of the story proves that wrong.
First published in The Virginia Quarterly Review, Fall 2018, and available to read to subscribers here, and via JStor here. Collected in Your Duck Is My Duck, Europa Editions, 2019
A Personal Anthology 