The Argonauts

“Before long I learned that you had spent a lifetime equally devoted to the conviction that words are not good enough. Not only not good enough, but corrosive to all that is good, all that is real, all that is flow. We argued and argued on this account, full of fever, not malice. Once we name something, you said, we can never see it the same way again. All that is unnamable falls away, gets lost, is murdered. […] I argued along the lines of Thomas Jefferson and the churches—for plethora, for kaleidoscope shifting, for excess. I insisted that words did more than nominate.”

The question of language’s power and limitations is a major theme in The Argonauts, and Nelson signals its importance by introducing it at the same time she introduces the relationship that the book will center on. More specifically, Dodge challenges Nelson’s longstanding faith in the ability of language to reflect even the most “inexpressible” parts of human experience. As Nelson indicates, she has tended to believe that language is ambiguous and “shifting” enough to at least gesture towards whatever it fails to explicitly describe—or as she puts it, “nominate” (3). 

Dodge, however, predominantly works in visual mediums like film and sculpture, and is suspicious of the way language shapes our understanding of the world; as he sees it, a word singles out one object from its surroundings (and likely singles out certain aspects of that object as well), and therefore destroys everything “unnameable.” Although this isn’t a view Nelson ever entirely embraces (she does, after all, continue to work as a writer), it’s an issue that surfaces throughout The Argonauts, often in connection to Nelson’s concerns about “totalizing” language—that is, language that overgeneralizes and therefore creates a false sense of certainty and solidity.