Katchor

Katchor's devotion to a word's sound and appearance, without regard to its sense, bespeaks his poetic interest in words as things, things not merely to be used for communicating but also to be "mentioned" in the linguistic sense, to be appreciated in their own right. Thus Katchor describes his delight in looking at "very ordinary words or names magnified to 10-foot high letters on the side of a building; ill-considered names that somebody invented . . . without really thinking, and then they put these things up on a wall—testing out a word in public." Katchor says that "[w]hen you see [a word] in this gigantic scale, it takes on another, mythical quality" (Pleasure of Urban Decay). For his part, Katchor puts a lot of time into coming up with the names in his strips, but he clings to an ideal of strangeness, of meaninglessness. "These names in the strip," he says, "are taken from Yiddish words, Latin words, English words, medical dictionaries—wherever I find words that have the right combination of sense and nonsense."

Katchor's names thus pull in two directions: toward and away from meaning. When his words stem from Yiddish, however, his refusal to provide translations moves beyond matters of pure sound. Katchor's attachment to untranslated Yiddish words reflects his own identity as a native speaker of Yiddish. Katchor has said that "[s]till to this day, Yiddish words for certain things are to [him] the real words" (ibid.). There's an ontological dimension to these Yiddish words—they're not simply the right words, they're the real words, all others being somehow false—and Katchor's feelings about Yiddish show how language can have a constitutive effect on identity.

Katchor's various linguistic interests come to the fore in The Jew of New York. Here, the choice of a writing system has a decisive influence in shaping identity; an Indian singing psalms in Hebrew "proves" that Native Americans are descended from the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel; and the misunderstanding of meaningful words has dire consequences for major characters, while the meaningless sounds of human digestion lead a mystic to heavenly visions.  continue...