How to Live Together: The Historicity of Language

This chapter shows that Seth’s works, notwithstanding their diversity, are articulated around the problematics of community and living together. Seth explores the conundrum of “the banality of evil” through a sustained reflection on the cliché, a discursive phenomenon at the intersection of rhetoric and ideology, based on an eternal return to the already-said and the already-thought. This reflection on community is intertwined with the problematics of multilingualism. In A Suitable Boy, Seth constantly exploits language as the texture of the social relationship; his relatively homogeneous prose encompasses a rich linguistic mosaic, inducing a constant reflection on the hurdles of translation and the fundamental historicity of language. The paradigm of translation plays a decisive role within a given linguistic community as well: from A Suitable Boy to An Equal Music, Seth explores the amphibolia of language and the misunderstandings that obstruct communication.