Title: “Pixar’s Troubled ‘Soul’”
Author: Namwali Serpell
Publisher: The New Yorker
Date: January 24, 2021
Form: Cultural Criticism
Keywords: Film, Race, Blackness, Animation
In an earlier post, I talked about the risks and rewards of coining terms. Get it wrong, and the reader rolls their eyes; used carefully, they can do important work. This is a post about the uses of etymology (broadly construed): about engaging with the roots and the neglected meanings of the terms you’re working with. I think it’s a similarly risky move. Nobody, after all, has high expectations for a best man’s speech that begins “Webster’s defines marriage as…”
What got me thinking about this most recently was Namwali Serpell’s New Yorker review of the Pixar movie Soul. It’s an extremely smart piece of writing, bookended by two etymological moments that together provide a microcosm of her argument about the film. The specifics of how she employs etymology here aren’t necessarily replicable, but I do think there’s something to be learned from her approach.
Lesson one is that etymology can be most effective when it’s used to create a tension—say, between one widely known meaning and another less obvious meaning. In Serpell’s case, that difference marks the gap between her argument’s starting point and its ultimate intervention. Put another way, in an argument that takes the form “this movie does X, but a better movie might have done Y,” Serpell uses etymology to communicate what X and Y are and the difference between them.
Lesson two—and this one’s more a question of taste and readership—is that, for me at least, etymology works better when it’s supporting a claim rather than the subject of a claim. Arguments about etymology are the domain of historical linguistics. Arguments that draw on etymology alongside other forms of evidence to support a larger claim about something bigger can reach a wider audience.
Those are my claims, then. Here’s my evidence:
Serpell’s piece engages with etymology twice, the first as its opening paragraph:
“In ancient Greece, the word for the soul was psyche. It is likely related to psykhein, meaning ‘to breathe’ or ‘to blow,’ which may come from the Indo-European root -bhes, meaning ‘breath.’”
Leading with etymology is especially risky (see: the hypothetical unimaginative best man’s speech)—in part, I think, because it can come across as an argument about etymology rather than an argument that uses etymology to get at something else. But Serpell does go on to connect the etymological claim here to a larger point: soul’s connection to breath, air, and wind, articulated via etymology, frames her analysis of the “airy realm” in which the movie is partly set.
The second engagement with etymology, in the essay’s penultimate sentence, is notably different. Prior to this point, Serpell has been tracing how Soul grapples, or often fails to grapple, with its status as “the latest in a long tradition of American race-transformation tales.” Though the movie “periodically erupts with the history of racism, or slavery,” she notes that its depictions of the Great Before and the Great Beyond feel above all like white corporate America: aesthetically, they’re slick, saccharine, empty, minimal—like the ancient Greek word, they’re airy, breathy.
The last part of the essay considers what the film might feel like if it engaged more deeply with the word soul as it’s used in Black English. She suggests that the film might be less individualistic: it might be more concerned with its protagonist’s people than with his solitary epiphany. And the afterlife, she suggests, might look less airy and more watery:
“In black American culture, a funeral is called a homegoing, partly owing to a syncretic conflation of the afterlife with Africa, the originary freedom. To cross over is to cross back, over the sea—which, by the way, is likely the origin of the English word soul, from the Proto-Germanic saiwaz, the idea being that water, not air, is the dwelling place of souls.”
The second engagement with etymology, then, is dropped almost as an afterthought, on the other side of an em-dash and a “which, by the way.” Serpell’s nonchalance here disguises it a little, but the whole of her argument—that Soul attends only tentatively to the Blackness of its protagonist—is compressed in this apparent aside. Soul’s underlying whiteness, her argument runs, comes down to a question of etymology: the movie bases its understanding of soul on the airy psyche rather than the watery saiwaz.
Read in this light, that first slightly rote invocation of etymology turns out to be fundamental. But the key thing here, I think, is that its true importance only emerges after you’ve read the second etymological moment, out of the tension between the two.
Working with etymology is tricky to get right. Sometimes you might be better off avoiding it so as not to come across like the unimaginative best man. But another option is to double down: with two etymologies, you can create a tension, and with a tension, an argument.
If you’re interested in further reading from/about Namwali Serpell’s work, I recommend both her novel The Old Drift and the Twitter book-club conversation about it currently taking place among a bunch of interesting literary critics under #TheOldDrift, as well as Serpell’s evergreen critique of reading for empathy in the NYRB.