When Myth Thinks: IV. The Absent Addressee

Genesis represents creation as speech.

God says, and the world comes to be.

But speech is inherently interpersonal. To say something is, in its nature, to say it to someone. Yet in the opening of Genesis there is no human interlocutor. There is a Sayer, but the addressee is absent.

This absence is curious.

It reminds us that language is not a solitary possession of an individual mind. Language is social through and through. Meaning is made within relations between people, and the linguistic construal of experience belongs to a shared meaning potential rather than to an isolated consciousness.

But the absent addressee can also invite another symbolic reading.

If God represents the language-user as the source of linguistic construal, then what is being addressed by the saying?

There is not yet a human listener. There is only the undifferentiated world that is to become a world of meaning.

The addressee can therefore be construed symbolically as experience itself: that which is not yet meaning, but which can become meaning through its linguistic construal.

This is not to say that experience is literally an addressee. The grammatical relation and the symbolic interpretation are different things. The point is that the myth gives us a dialogue in which the other participant has not yet appeared.

The world is there, but it has not yet been construed.

God says:

“Let there be light.”

And there is light.

The saying thus stands at the boundary between what is not yet meaningfully differentiated and what can become so.

This gives the creation scene a double significance.

On one side, it symbolises the social nature of language: meaning arises within an interpersonal semiotic system.

On the other, it symbolises the construal of experience: what is given becomes available as meaning.

The absent addressee therefore marks something that language always encounters but never simply becomes: the experience that is to be construed.

Genesis represents this relationship mythically.

A Sayer speaks before there is anyone to hear, and the world appears as the content of the saying.

The dialogue has begun before the interlocutor has arrived.

Perhaps that is because the human interlocutor is still being created.

And perhaps, in the deepest irony of the story, the one who will eventually hear the saying will also be a meaning created by it.