“Language is by nature fictional”
—or, why the word for moonlight can’t be moonlight
Thus far in our introduction to theoretical writing we’ve seen some fairly large claims being made for language. We’ve been instructed that theoretical writing demands nothing less than our radically “coming to terms” with linguistic determinism, our bowing down, as it were, to language as invader of the universal problematic, surrendering to language as constitutive power behind all human reality, accepting language as origin and limit of all personal identity, and so on. But now we’re being asked to swallow the pill that “language is, by nature, fictional” (Barthes 1981: 87); we find ourselves being told that almighty language—“this alien and inhuman force . . . which tortures and scars our existence as human animals” (Jameson 2006: 393)—isn’t even really real.1 This claim would seem particularly counter-intuitive, since we are obviously really using language at the present moment to communicate, or because the very assertion that “language is by nature fictional” must be made in language, therefore language must exist, and so on. So where does theory get off, telling us, on the one hand, that we’re made out of language and then, on the other, that language is nothing but fiction?
To understand the real significance of the claim that significance isn’t real, to grasp “the virtual [fictional or unreal] character of the symbolic order [as] the very condition of human historicity” (Žižek 1999/2002: 241), we need first to situate fictionality between relative unrealness and absolute non-existence. To say, with Roland Barthes, that language is nothing but fiction, to say, with the structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, that language is “a form and not a substance” (1959: 122), is not to say, absurdly, that language doesn’t exist; it is to say that language is not a substantial thing, but it’s not to say that there’s “no such thing” as language. For after all, fiction obviously exists—it’s demonstrably not the case that there’s “no such thing” as fiction, and I could give you a fairly substantial list of not too shabby examples thereof (Antigone, Beloved, Candide, Disgrace, Ethan Frome, Germinal, Hamlet, Infinite Jest, Kangaroo, Lolita, Molloy, and so on). So, since there clearly are such “things” in the world as “pieces of fiction,” to say that language is by nature fictional is not to say that language doesn’t exist.
But to assert language’s “natural” fictionality is to foreground its unnaturalness, its “virtual character,” and, in that quite specific sense, its antiphysical unrealness. For “fiction,” by definition, isn’t real. Just as human beings must distinguish themselves from non-human animal nature in order to live as human beings, as subjects of human reality, so “fiction” must bring itself into existence as fiction by formally distinguishing itself from the really real. Fiction’s very existence as fiction definitionally depends upon this separation from the real, this active negation of the real. If a little piece of fiction, like that bit from Henry James that he calls “The Real Thing,” were somehow to become the real thing, to become real, to become “fact,” it would thereby cease to be fiction, no?
Well, in much the same way, the existence of language as language depends upon a similar separation from and negation of the real. So, we might venture to rewrite and expand upon Barthes’ claim that language is by nature fictional as follows—language exists, but it’s not real. It cannot possibly be real. In order to be language, to exist as language, language must separate itself from the real thing, cut itself off from the really real. If language were somehow to become real, to merge with the real, to become identical with the real, it would, by definition, cease to exist—or, at least, it would no longer be language (though whatever it would be I really can’t say). Language, in other words, comes into existence not by positively but vaguely “saying something,” but rather by negatively but specifically having “said” no to the real. Whatever language affirmatively says, it says only by virtue of this primordially prohibitive no. This negation of the real, this prohibition against identity with the real, is language’s existential condition of possibility.
Some examples drawn from the realms of words and things might help us out here, so let’s say that in order to mean “elephant,” the word “elephant” cannot be an elephant. A complete merger of the meaningful word with the elephantine thing would not be possible, would not be meaningful. Of course, nothing prevents me from saying the word “elephant” in the real physical presence of a pachyderm or even from painting the word “elephant” on the said elephant’s hide. The word’s meaning, however, in no way depends upon that real, hidebound presence in order to mean. Rather, the word’s meaning depends upon the real thing’s absence, its disappearance, its non-being. In language, in other words, there can never be a completely real coincidence of being and meaning. For “to mean,” as Barbara Johnson writes, “is automatically not to be. As soon as there is meaning, there is difference” (1981: ix).
But let’s get “down to earth” here and literally (that is to say, figuratively) run this point into the ground. Let’s say that even if I were to trace the word “dirt” into actual ground, into an actual spread of real dirt, the fingered word “dirt” still wouldn’t be dirt; it would merely mean dirt. What allows the meaning of the word “dirt” to emerge from the dirt is nothing other than the four letters, the purely formal delineations of non-dirt that I’ve traced into the dirty surface. These formal delineations, these narrow defiles of non-dirt within otherwise unfurrowed substance—these non-substantial fissures within formlessly real soil—become the existential openings (the very souls, if you like) of meaning itself. Meaning must formally or soulfully separate itself out, must cleanse itself of and distinguish itself from formlessly real being, in order to raise itself up out of the really real as clear or distinct meaning. Meaning must mean non-merger with murkily real being. The veritable “law” of meaning means quite precisely that the word for “elephant” must not be elephant, that the word for “dirt” must not be dirt.
We can take the letter of this “law” back to our previous lesson. Its significance is not simply that “meaning is the polite word for pleasure.” Our lesson’s actual significance is that pleasure itself is a polite word for pleasure, that any meaningful word (pleasure, elephant, dirt) is a “polite” substitute for and separation from the real thing or experience that it names. To mean “pleasure,” the word “pleasure” is prohibited from really being pleasure. I don’t mean to say that saying the word “pleasure” can’t be pleasurable, can’t be a form (however attenuated) of enjoyment. I do mean to say that saying “pleasure” never necessarily depends upon one’s really experiencing pleasure; rather, the word “pleasure” depends upon the possibility of our not really enjoying ourselves, of our not experiencing real pleasure; it depends upon the possibility of pleasure’s non-presence. If one could say “pleasure” and really mean it only if one were at the precise moment of enunciation really experiencing a pleasure that was not only completely identical with the word but in fact caused one to say it, then the word “pleasure” as word would not be possible. The word “pleasure” need not be caused or accompanied by real pleasure any more than the exclamation “ouch” need be caused or accompanied by actual pain—we can say “ouch” even when we’re not being bitten or stung or insulted, and we can say “pleasure” even at moments, such as perhaps this very one, when we’re not having any fun at all.
Again, what makes the presence of any word possible is nothing but the possible absence of the real thing or experience that it names, which is precisely why Lacan characterizes the word as “a presence made of absence.”
In order for the symbolic object freed from its usage to become the word freed from the hic et nunc [here and now], the difference resides . . . in its vanishing being in which the symbol finds the permanence of the concept. Through the word—which is already a presence made of absence—absence itself comes to be named . . . And from this articulated couple of presence and absence . . . a language’s world of meaning is born, in which the world of things [must] situate itself (1966d/2006: 228).
For Lacan, the ways by which language is “by nature fictional” are intimately related to the rules and regulations that make “meaning” the polite word for pleasure in a world that must be made to mean. In other words, for Lacan, our linguistic separation from and negation of “the real” has everything to do with what he calls “the symbolic order”—the imperative processes of anthropogenesis that we belabored in our first two lessons. To demonstrate the relations among these lessons even further, however, I’m afraid I’m going to have to give you the finger.
That is to say, I’m going to have to ask you to imagine that you are a very young child, in the very last stages of your infancy, not yet “in language” but on the cusp of “learning to read” in the sense described in the previous lesson. Imagine that I am the adult standing before you, trying to give you one of your first reading lessons. In this imaginary scene, I am using not my middle but rather my index finger to indicate something “over there” to which I want to direct your attention, some real thing other than my finger that I employ my finger to point out to you. You, however, continue to stare at my pointing finger, blissfully unaware that “pointing” is what I’m attempting to do with this digit. I can therefore jab and gesticulate as much as I please, but you simply won’t get the picture; you won’t get the point of my pointing. Illiterate infant that you are, you don’t yet know how to “read,” so you don’t understand that this finger isn’t merely a finger, a column of flesh moving back and forth in space, in a relatively undifferentiated, pointless, or meaningless “here and now.” Incapable as yet of meaningful speech, you don’t realize that, in giving you the finger, I am giving or trying to give you a sign. Not yet up to speed on your structural linguistics, you don’t comprehend that this “indexical” sign is comprised of a signifier (the index finger as pointer) and a signified (the point, the “concept” I’m trying to convey, which in this case is “hey, look over there”). Nor do you yet grasp that the function of a sign (signifier and signified combined) is to refer to something else, something other, a referent (in this case, whatever the stupid or wonderful thing “over there” is that I so desperately want you to look at).2 Because you don’t yet “get” any of these points, because you’re not yet in any position to take pointers, you won’t take your eyes off my finger. I might as well be gesturing to a gerbil.
Now, if all I really wanted from this exercise were simply to get you to “look over there,” then I could finally resort to just picking you up and pointing your little eyes in the thing’s direction so that you would finally really see it. But we would have accomplished very little by these merely physical acrobatics. Therefore, because what I must want is for you to learn to read, not just see, I must make you see this thing (my finger) not just as a real thing floating around in this immediate space but as a veritable sign indicating some other thing elsewhere. To give you the finger as mediating sign, I must gently or sternly deny you the finger as finger. To teach you to “read” finger as a sign, I must, as it were, wean you from finger qua finger. And this weaning denial will no doubt initiate itself in the form of the prohibitive word no, as in, no, don’t look at my finger, look over there; no, dumbass, not this stupid thing but that one; no, you cannot just keep staring at my finger; no, you must tear yourself away from the real flesh and look to that “other scene” to which the flesh is pointing; no, our flesh and bone can’t just be pointless boney flesh, it all must signify something; no, our fingers can’t just be, they must mean, must be ordered, must be named. And the same thing goes for you too, sweetie.
Not that sweet little infant you would actually take in any of these words, even though according to Lacan you’ve “always already” been taken in by them insofar as language always “exists prior to each subject’s entrance into it at a certain moment in [its] psychic development” (Lacan 1966e/2006: 413). But, if you’re ever going to become anything more than a sweet (or squawking) little animal, you must begin to hear that sour note; you must begin to understand the “negating” function of the first word in each of my prohibitory but literacy-enabling phrases (no, don’t look at my finger; no, not here but there, and so on); moreover, you must, on some level, “understand” that this singularly prohibitive and negative word no actually precedes and precipitates all the words and all the phrases that you’re ever going to understand in your life. The world that you are sentenced to enter must be made to mean, but it’s precisely this primordial “no to the real” that first makes any meaning happen, that initially gets any sentence in any language up and running, by preventing any word you can imagine from ever really being the real thing that it names. Erecting, so to speak, a permanent and irreversible divide between real being and significant meaning, this primordial no is built into and basically causes or makes possible any articulation whatsoever. In order to signify anything, a sign can never be a simple, indivisible, absolute “thing in itself,” but must always separate itself into a signifier and a signified, a pointer and a point. In order to be a meaningful word, a word can never simply remain what it “really” is—a certain quantum of sheer materiality, of ink on a page, or chalk on a board, or pixels on a screen. No, it must articulate a message, and back behind any articulation lurks the fundamental imperative of the symbolic order, which is simply this word—no. No, you can’t keep looking here for your pleasure; no, you can’t simply remain in the pure pleasure principle of the immediate experience of real being; as per the final words of Beckett’s The Unnamable, no, you can’t stay here; no, you can’t even stay there; no, you must “go on” (1955: 414).
The real being that meaning must leave behind in order to “go on” meaning is “the real” in Lacan’s sense, the “oceanic feeling” in Freud’s—a formless, limitless, undifferentiated experience of the “all” of the hic et nunc, the immediately here and now. Meaning, as such, formally cuts into and incisively removes us from our experience of that simple “immediate” being and “sends” us, as if we ourselves were letters, on our limited, grammatically regulated, and politely articulated way. For it’s the real function of any meaningful word to tear us away from immediate being, to deliver us from the undifferentiated darkness of “the Real always lurking dimly in the background” (Jameson 2006: 376), and send or carry us in a brighter, more promisingly significant direction. Any meaningful word must point us away from itself and prod us to “go on” to the next word in the chain of signifiers (so please imagine my exemplary finger as pointing from left to right, the direction in which we in English read). The word “the,” for example, the so-called definite article, seems to say something positively “in itself” to its reader—something affirmative, like “My name is ‘the’ and I am the definite article.” But even if it is the definite article, which it is, “the” still isn’t simply the real thing; because it’s a word, the word “the” still must always say “no” to whatever real thing or stuff (like ink or sound) that it might substantially be. In other words, the word “the” can never allow its reader to stay with it. Like the fallen grunt in the military action film who waves his comrades on, heroically urging the rest of the squad to keep going, the word “the” must always impel the reader to abandon it, to leave it behind, to keep moving on—if only just one more space . . . to . . . the . . . right. In other words, the word “the” must always carry out its symbolic orders and the symbolic order itself— the word “the” must prod the . . . reader to move on to the . . . next word in the . . . temporal sequence of meaning that we . . . call . . . the . . . sentence.3
As these annoyingly retarded articulations might help me suggest, “language is by nature fictional” not only because, like fiction, it isn’t really real, but also because, like fiction, it usually involves something resembling narrative design, the formal manipulation of merely chronological revelation upon which the craft or sullen art of narration depends.4 Certain exercises in the art of the sentence—consider the hard work of a Henry James or a David Foster Wallace—can read like gnarly epics. But even the briefest of complete and fully predicated sentences, even those completely innocent of craft, still manage to tell a little story, unfold a tale, relate the dramatic adventures of a grammatical subject, verbalize an action, enact a beginning, stage a middle, and struggle toward an end, providing, perhaps, a relatively satisfying sense of narrative closure.5
But if language is “fictional” not only because it de-realizes but also because it “narrates,” just what sort of story does language actually tell? For Lacan, the story of language always at some level involves Oedipus, or Oedipal desire. Lacan, that is, rather tirelessly (and, for some, tiresomely) relates language acquisition to what Freud famously dubs the Oedipus complex.6 But Lacan “Oedipalizes” our accession to language not simply for psychological reasons, not simply because language acquisition and the onset of the Oedipus complex can be said to “happen” at roughly the same time in the child’s psychological development; rather, Lacan links language to Oedipus for “structural” reasons. He posits, that is, a structural analogy between the primordial “no to the real” that initiates all access to language and the “paternal” prohibition against incest that bars all sexual access to the mother’s body and thereby founds any exogamous social order whatsoever. Obviously, Lacan’s analogy goes against the grain of consciously common sense; after all, it’s pretty hard to grasp what our conventionally grammatical desire to make complete sentences might have in common with our unconsciously Oedipal desire to “make it” with the mom. But if you can understand how “the symbolic order” as the “law” of meaning that separates you from your immediately real being and subjects you to conventional rules of grammar and syntax might be analogous to “the symbolic order” as the “law” against incest that separates you from the maternal body and subjects you to the conventional regulations of normative heterosexuality, then you basically get the Lacanian picture. If you can understand that “meaning” means both that you can no longer simply be in the undifferentiated real and that you can no longer “be with” your mother in the exclusive way that you might unconsciously desire, if you can understand that “the symbolic order” is an “order to symbolize” your mother (and everything else in the world) rather than “totally” be with her as if you and she were “everything” and there really were nothing or no one else out there—then you’re well on your way to speaking basic Lacanese (whether you want to be or not).
But let’s leave Lacan, not to mention our poor mothers, out of this discussion for the moment and return to the question of “real being” and of language’s fictive negation thereof. I’ve suggested that linguistic meaning tears us away from the pure unmediated “here and now” of real being and sends us on our intelligibly articulated way. I’ve insisted that, consequent to this “tearing,” there is an irrevocable split or rupture between being and meaning. A word, as I insist (or as the very pronoun “I” insists), can never be the thing that it names (elephant, dirt, me, etc.), and a thing (like my dirty finger) can never remain a simple, self-identical thing if it is ever made to function as a sign.
But is it a “good thing” or a “bad thing” that “the word” can never be “the real thing”? It depends, perhaps, upon the specific word in relation to the particular thing. To illustrate this “moral relativism,” we can note a rather interesting thing that happens late in Don DeLillo’s short novel The Body Artist, a sort of postmodern ghost story that, like most of DeLillo’s fictions, meditates upon the strange and (in DeLillo’s view) occasionally miraculous things that can happen in contemporary (fictional) encounters between language and the real. The story concerns a woman, Lauren Hartke, a performance or “body artist” who, while mourning the death of her film-maker husband, apparently discovers a strange quasiperson living in her (formerly their) house. This male semipersonage may be the embodied ghost of Lauren’s husband, or he may be an imaginary figment that Lauren is cooking up for one of her embodied performance-art pieces, or he may simply be “a retarded man” (2001: 102) who has wandered away from some nearby institution. Whatever he may be or mean, this figure—nameless, though Lauren for reasons of her own calls him “Mr. Tuttle”—is presented to us as suffering from a disorder of speech, a sort of linguistic indeterminism. Mr Tuttle speaks, utters intelligible and even uncannily familiar words, but he is still paradoxically caught up in what the narrator calls “the not-as-if of things” (2001: 92). We are told a number of things about Mr Tuttle, but the most pertinent for our purposes here is that he “hasn’t learned the language. There has to be an imaginary point [says our narrator], a nonplace where language intersects with our perceptions of time and space, and he [Mr. Tuttle] is a stranger at this crossing, without words or bearings” (2001: 101). Because he is so alien to this linguistic crossing, because he cannot quite successfully use good old words to cognitively map his “being in the world,” Mr Tuttle, we are told, “violates the limits of the human” (2001: 102).
This description of Mr Tuttle’s loss of bearings makes it sound “as if” he’s in an unbearably inhuman spot. And yet, despite (or perhaps because of) his strange violation of human limits, Mr Tuttle manages to say some lovely, brilliant things. For example:
He said, “The word for moonlight is moonlight.”
[And] this made [Lauren] happy. It was logically complex and oddly moving and circularly beautiful and true—or maybe not so circular but straight as straight can be. (2001:84)
Now, bear in mind that Mr Tuttle isn’t simply being tautological here. He isn’t just elliptically claiming that the word that we use to designate the phenomenon called moonlight is this specific word, “moonlight.” Rather, he claims, flat-out, “straight as straight can be,” that the word moonlight really is moonlight. This “poetical” merging of word with wave strikes Lauren as “beautiful” and thus makes her “happy,” thus reminding us of Stendhal’s tragicomic characterization of “beauty” as “the promise of happiness.” But even though it makes her happy because she finds it beautiful—and even though a line from Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” instructs us that the “articulated couple” or aesthetic/veridical copulation of beauty with truth is all we know and all we need to know—is Lauren “right” to consider Mr Tuttle’s statement “true”? Doesn’t this “logically complex” statement logically contradict everything we’ve learned in this lesson about the impossibility of a word’s meaning merging with its real being? If “elephant” can’t be an elephant and “dirt” can’t be dirt and “I” can’t be me, how can “moonlight” possibly be moonlight? Truly, maybe sadly, but in the end, I think, quite fortunately, it just can’t be; it can’t possibly simultaneously mean and be.
But why the hell not? And what’s so “fortunate” about this sad impossibility of the said? Why might it be a “good thing” that linguistic meaning both makes and breaks the so-called promise of happiness? OK, so Mr Tuttle’s blurting out that “the word for moonlight is moonlight” makes Lauren happy—fair enough. But we might ask if Lauren would have been made just as happy if Mr Tuttle had proclaimed that “The words for internal hemorrhage are internal hemorrhage”? The sentence is far from beautiful, you’ll agree, but it could only quite disastrously be “true.” For if the statement were “literally” true, then no “body artist” could ever produce the words “internal hemorrhage” without her body’s internally hemorrhaging. Or, to take the art back out of the body, what if Mr Tuttle had asserted that “the word for excrement is excrement”? It’s hard to imagine that Mr Tuttle’s pressing those little words out of his uncanny hole would have made Lauren or DeLillo or Keats or any lover of beauty and truth radiantly happy.
So, yeah, maybe it’s a real shame, on the one hand, that the word for moonlight can never really be moonlight, that we can’t just utter this enchanting word and be instantly bathed in lovely lunar lucidity. But on the other hand, maybe it’s a relatively good thing that you can ask for a “concrete example” of the difference between being and meaning without having a cinderblock fall on your head. Maybe it’s a good thing that words for real excrement aren’t really excremental things. Maybe it’s a good thing that we’re all able to utter our favorite excremental words without finding our mouths filled with you-know-what, that we can read Eliot’s The Waste Land without actually landing in waste, and so on.
Maybe, at the end of the day, there’s something to be said for our just saying “no” to non-differentiation, for our being able to distinguish ourselves from the real, simply by saying “no, not really what we had in mind.” Maybe there’s something to be said for being’s being said, even if saying so means forever losing all our oceanic feelings. Maybe there’s something to be said for our being able to say, which is to say, our being able to lie, to fabricate, to negate “the not-as-if of things” by making metaphors, by reading and writing, telling the stories of our so-called lives, proliferating ourselves quite precisely as fictions. Maybe we readers and writers and would-be lovers of literature should be enormously grateful that language is by nature fictional, even if its unstable fabrications actually turn out to be the stuff that we’re made of, even if such gratitude puts us in the exceedingly strange position of having to say thanks to no one for nothing. Yes, the “no to the real” that makes the phrase “real significance” nonsensical, that makes language, and hence we ourselves, possible, may prevent us from getting all that we might really desire. But such negativity also protects us from getting more than we might really deserve. We may be “real-losers” in the sacrificial exchange of our being for a meaning that can never be completely real again, but, considering what we get out of it, and considering what it gets us out of, we might just have to say that “radically linguistic determinism”—our being sentenced to sentences, to being nothing by nature if not fictionalized characters, anthropomorphized animals at the mercy of language, male and female impersonators in a world that must be made to mean—can’t really be the dirtiest trick that was ever played on us, can’t really be the crappiest thing that ever happened to us. While the slogan “language is by nature fictional” might seem like the worst bit of “ontological bad news” (Butler 1999: 198) ever to hit the fan, it really can’t be the unhappiest headline, the most unpromising piece of prose, that any real fan of writing has ever encountered, that any really appreciative reader of fiction has ever really read.
Coming to Terms
Critical Keywords encountered in Lesson Three:
sign, signifier/signified, referent, narrative/narration
Notes
1 When Roland Barthes makes this remark in Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, he is specifically reflecting upon language’s problem with authentication as compared to the camera’s capacity for more veridical documentation (i.e., the now dated, pre-Photoshop idea that the camera doesn’t lie). Compare the evidentiary value of a sworn statement such as “I was the man, I suffered, I was there” with an undoctored photograph that might conclusively prove that I was really a woman enjoying myself elsewhere.
2 All of these terms—signifier, signified, sign, referent—pertain to the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure, which we will explore at greater length in Lesson Eight.
3 Unless of course the “the” in question is that last word of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, in which case the reader is compelled to circle back to the text’s first word, “riverrun,” and begin the fiction all over again.
4 “The narrative theory of Russian Formalism distinguishes between story (fabula) and plot (sujet), between the story and the way it is told. Fabula . . . refers to the story as it might have occurred in real time and constitutes the raw narrative material awaiting the formal manipulation of the author. Sujet . . . designates the authorial transformation worked upon the story” (Childers and Hentzi 1995: 106).
5 “Structurally, narrative shares the characteristic of the sentence without ever being reducible to the sum of its sentences: a narrative is a long sentence, just as every constative sentence is in a way the rough outline of a short narrative” (Barthes 1966/1977: 84).
6 The Oedipus complex involves the idea that every child unconsciously desires complete “possession” of the mother and thus jealously and aggressively regards the father as a rival. Freud names this complex after the tragic title figure in Sophocles’ play Oedipus Rex, the man who consciously attempts to avoid his “fate” (an oracle tells him that he will murder his father and “marry” his mother) and thus unwittingly blunders into it. Freud also offers an Oedipal interpretation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, suggesting that Hamlet can’t bring himself to kill Claudius because Hamlet unconsciously identifies with the man who has done in fact what Hamlet himself desires to do in his dreams—dispatch the father and “marry” the mother.