Words and Needs and Langland, oh my! :
Our needs are made of words. They come to us in speech, and they can die for lack of expression. Without a public language to help us find our own words, our needs will dry up in silence. It is words only, the common meanings they bear, which give me the right to speak in the name of the strangers at my door. --Michael Ignatieff, The Needs of Strangers
I've been thinking about this a lot because I'm writing a paper on a passage in C Passus IX in Piers Plowman that's unlike anything I've encountered before in all my reading in medieval lit. In it, the narrative focuses on the life of a poor woman who lives in a cot, who, with spinning to spare "spenen hit on hous-huyre, / Bothe in mylke and in mele, to make with papelotes / To agloyte with here gurles that greden aftur fode" (C.IX.79-101). What struck me about this passage, and made me want to write about it, was something one of my illustrious colleagues brought up in class: the way that Langland, in his intense focus on the intimate details of a life of need, shows how poverty changes someone's perception of not only their sensory landscape, but of language. So that spinning is not just spinning anymore, it's hous-huyre, mylke and mele, papelotes, and finally, sustenance for a child.
Langland is constantly ready, in PP, to speak in the name of strangers at his door (if, by strangers, one means Christian "neyhebores"), but how can he do this if he evacuates words of the common meanings they bear? Or is that really what he's doing?
And what does it mean, finally, when Ignatieff says that only the common meanings of words give me the right to speak in the name of the strangers at my door? Elsewhere he speaks of the "dangerous licence" afforded one by appropriating for oneself the right to speak for the needs of others: how can we ever know what another really needs when, sometimes, we don't even know what we need ourselves, and when the others we so sanctimoniously speak for can't articulate their needs at all? Is it that somewhere, in the interference between our semantic fields, we can read something true, or at least useful?
