The Apostle tells us that in the beginning was the Word. He gives us no assurance as to the end.
It is appropriate that he should have used the Greek language to express the Hellenistic conception of the Logos, for it is to the fact of its Greek-Judaic inheritance that Western civilization owes its essentially verbal character. We take this character for granted. It is the root and bark of our experience and we cannot readily transpose our imaginings outside it. We live inside the act of discourse. But we should not assume that a verbal matrix is the only one in which the articulations and conduct of the mind are conceivable. There are modes of intellectual and sensuous reality founded not on language, but on other communicative energies such as the icon or the musical note. And there are actions of the spirit rooted in silence. It is difficult to speak of these, for how should speech justly convey the shape and vitality of silence? But I can cite examples of what I mean.
In certain Oriental metaphysics, in Buddhism and Taoism, the soul is envisioned as ascending from the gross impediments of the material, through domains of insight that can be rendered by lofty and precise language, toward ever deepening silence. The highest, purest reach of the contemplative act is that which has learned to leave language behind it. The ineffable lies beyond the frontiers of the word. It is only by breaking through the walls of language that visionary observance can enter the world of total and immediate understanding. Where such understanding is attained, the truth need no longer suffer the impurities and fragmentation that speech necessarily entails. It need not conform to the naïve logic and linear conception of time implicit in syntax. In ultimate truth, past, present, and future are simultaneously comprised. It is the temporal structure of language that keeps them artificially distinct. That is the crucial point.
The holy man, the initiate, withdraws not only from the temptations of worldly action; he withdraws from speech. His retreat into the mountain cave or monastic cell is the outward gesture of his silence. Even those who are only novices on this arduous road are taught to distrust the veil of language, to break through it to the more real. The Zen koan—we know the sound of two hands clapping, what is the sound of one?—is a beginner’s exercise in the retreat from the word.
The Western tradition also knows transcendences of language toward silence. The Trappist ideal goes back to abandonments of speech as ancient as those of the Stylites and Desert Fathers. St. John of the Cross expresses the austere exaltation of the contemplative soul as it breaks loose from the moorings of common verbal understanding:
Entréme donde no supe,
Y quedéme no sabiendo,
Toda sciencia trascendiendo.
But to the Western point of view, this order of experience inevitably carries a flavor of mysticism. And, whatever our lip service (itself a revealing term) to the sanctity of the mystic vocation, the commanding Western attitude is that of Cardinal Newman’s quip, that mysticism begins in mist and ends in schism. Very few Western poets—perhaps only Dante—have persuaded the imagination of the authority of transrational experience. We accept, at the lambent close of the Paradiso, the blindness of eye and understanding before the totality of vision. But Pascal is nearer the mainstream of classic Western feeling when he says that the silence of cosmic space strikes terror. To the Taoist that selfsame silence conveys tranquillity and the intimation of God.
The primacy of the word, of that which can be spoken and communicated in discourse, is characteristic of the Greek and Judaic genius and carried over into Christianity. The classic and the Christian sense of the world strive to order reality within the governance of language. Literature, philosophy, theology, law, the arts of history, are endeavors to enclose within the bounds of rational discourse the sum of human experience, its recorded past, its present condition and future expectations. The code of Justinian, the Summa of Aquinas, the world chronicles and compendia of medieval literature, the Divina Commedia, are attempts at total containment. They bear solemn witness to the belief that all truth and realness—with the exception of a small, queer margin at the very top—can be housed inside the walls of language.
This belief is no longer universal. Confidence in it declines after the age of Milton. The cause and history of that decline throw sharp light on the circumstances of modern literature and language.
It is during the seventeenth century that significant areas of truth, reality, and action recede from the sphere of verbal statement. It is, on the whole, true to say that until the seventeenth century the predominant bias and content of the natural sciences were descriptive. Mathematics had its long, brilliant history of symbolic notation; but even mathematics was a shorthand for verbal propositions applicable to, and meaningful within, the framework of linguistic description. Mathematical thought, with certain notable exceptions, was anchored to the material conditions of experience. These, in turn, were ordered and ruled by language. During the seventeenth century, this ceased to be the general case, and there began a revolution that has transformed forever man’s relationship to reality and radically altered the shapes of thought.
With the formulation of analytical geometry and the theory of algebraic functions, with the development by Newton and Leibniz of calculus, mathematics ceases to be a dependent notation, an instrument of the empirical. It becomes a fantastically rich, complex, and dynamic language. And the history of that language is one of progressive untranslatability. It is still possible to translate back into verbal equivalents, or at least close approximations, the proceedings of classical geometry and classical functional analysis. Once mathematics turns modern, however, and begins exhibiting its enormous powers of autonomous conception, such translation becomes less and less possible. The great architectures of form and meaning conceived by Gauss, Cauchy, Abel, Cantor, and Weierstrass recede from language at an ever accelerated pace. Or rather, they require and develop languages of their own as articulate and elaborate as those of verbal discourse. And between these languages and that of common usage, between the mathematical symbol and the word, the bridges grow more and more tenuous, until at last they are down.
Between verbal languages, however remote in setting and habits of syntax, there is always the possibility of equivalence, even if actual translation can only attain rough and approximate results. The Chinese ideogram can be transposed into English by paraphrase or lexical definition. But there are no dictionaries to relate the vocabulary and grammar of higher mathematics to those of verbal speech. One cannot “translate” the conventions and notations governing the operations of Lie groups or the properties of n-dimensional manifolds into any words or grammar outside mathematics. One cannot even paraphrase. A paraphrase of a good poem may turn out to be bad prose; but there is a discernible continuity between shadow and substance. The paraphrase of a complex theorem in topology can only be a grossly inadequate approximation or a transposal into another branch or “dialect” of the particular mathematical language. Many of the spaces, relations, and events that advanced mathematics deals with have no necessary correlation with sense-data; they are “realities” occurring within closed axiomatic systems. You can speak about them meaningfully and normatively only in the speech of mathematics. And that speech, beyond a fairly rudimentary plane, is not and cannot be verbal. I have watched topologists, knowing no syllable of each other’s language, working effectively together at a blackboard in the silent speech common to their craft.
This is a fact of tremendous implication. It has divided the experience and perception of reality into separate domains. The most decisive change in the tenor of Western intellectual life since the seventeenth century is the submission of successively larger areas of knowledge to the modes and proceedings of mathematics. As has often been noted, a branch of inquiry passes from pre-science into science when it can be mathematically organized. It is the development within itself of formulaic and statistical means that gives to a science its dynamic possibilities. The tools of mathematical analysis transformed chemistry and physics from alchemy to the predictive sciences that they now are. By virtue of mathematics, the stars move out of mythology into the astronomer’s table. And as mathematics settles into the marrow of a science, the concepts of that science, its habits of invention and understanding, become steadily less reducible to those of common language.
It is arrogant, if not irresponsible, to invoke such basic notions in our present model of the universe as quanta, the indeterminacy principle, the relativity constant, or the lack of parity in so-called weak interactions of atomic particles, if one cannot do so in the language appropriate to them—that is to say, in mathematical terms. Without it, such words are phantasms to deck out the pretense of philosophers or journalists. Because physics has had to borrow them from the vulgate, some of these words seem to retain a generalized meaning; they give a semblance of metaphor. But this is an illusion. When a critic seeks to apply the indeterminacy principle to his discussion of action painting or of the use of improvisation in contemporary music, he is not relating two spheres of experience; he is merely talking nonsense.*
We must guard against such deception. Chemistry uses numerous terms derived from its earlier descriptive stage; but the formulas of modern molecular chemistry are, in fact, a shorthand whose vernacular is not that of verbal speech but that of mathematics. A chemical formula does not abbreviate a linguistic statement; it codifies a numerical operation. Biology is in a fascinating intermediary position. Classically, it was a descriptive science, relying on a precise and suggestive use of language. The force of Darwin’s biological and zoological proposals was founded, in part, on the persuasion of his style. In post-Darwinian biology, mathematics has played an ever more commanding role. The change of stress is clearly marked in Wentworth Thompson’s great work, Of Growth and Form, a book in which poet and mathematician are equally engaged. Today, large areas of biology, such as genetics, are mainly mathematical. Where biology turns toward chemistry, and biochemistry is at present the high ground, it tends to relinquish the descriptive for the enumerative. It abandons the word for the figure.
It is this extension of mathematics over great areas of thought and action that broke Western consciousness into what C. P. Snow calls “the two cultures.” Until the time of Goethe and Humboldt, it was possible for a man of exceptional ability and retentiveness to feel at home in both the humanistic and the mathematical cultures. Leibniz had still been able to make notable contributions to both. This is no longer a real possibility. The chasm between the languages of words and of mathematics grows constantly wider. Standing on either rim are men who, in respect of each other, are illiterate. There is as great a sum of illiteracy in not knowing the basic concepts of calculus or spherical geometry as there is in not knowing grammar. Or to use Snow’s famous example: a man who has read no Shakespeare is uncultured; so is one who is ignorant of the second law of thermodynamics. Each is blind to comparable worlds.
Except in moments of bleak clarity, we do not yet act as if this were true. We continue to assume that humanistic authority, the sphere of the word, is predominant. The notion of essential literacy is still rooted in classic values, in a sense of discourse, rhetoric, and poetics. But this is ignorance or sloth of imagination. Calculus, the laws of Carnot, Maxwell’s conception of the electromagnetic field, not only comprise areas of reality and action as great as those comprised by classic literacy; they probably give an image of the perceptible world truer to fact than can be derived from any structure of verbal assertion. All evidence suggests that the shapes of matter are mathematical, that integral and differential calculus are the alphabet of just perception. The humanist today is in the position of those tenacious, aggrieved spirits who continued to envision the earth as a flat table after it had been circumnavigated, or who persisted in believing in occult propulsive energies after Newton had formulated the laws of motion and inertia.
Those of us who are compelled by our ignorance of exact science to imagine the universe through a veil of non-mathematical language inhabit an animate fiction. The actual facts of the case—the space-time continuum of relativity, the atomic structure of all matter, the wave-particle state of energy—are no longer accessible through the word. It is no paradox to assert that in cardinal respects reality now begins outside verbal language. Mathematicians know this. “By its geometric and later by its purely symbolic construction,” says Andreas Speiser, “mathematics shook off the fetters of language … and mathematics today is more efficient in its sphere of the intellectual world, than the modern languages in their deplorable state or even music are on their respective fronts.”
Few humanists are aware of the scope and nature of this great change (Sartre is a notable exception and has, time and again, drawn attention to la crise du langage). Nevertheless, many of the traditional humanistic disciplines have shown a deep malaise, a nervous, complex recognition of the exactions and triumphs of mathematics and the natural sciences. There has taken place in history, economics, and what are called, significantly, the “social sciences” what one might term a fallacy of imitative form. In each of these fields, the mode of discourse still relies almost completely on word-language. But historians, economists, and social scientists have tried to graft on to the verbal matrix some of the proceedings of mathematics or total rigor. They have grown defensive about the essentially provisional and aesthetic character of their own pursuits.
Observe how the cult of the positive, the exact, and the predictive has invaded history. The decisive turn occurs in the nineteenth century, in the work of Ranke, Comte, and Taine. Historians began regarding their material as elements in the crucible of controlled experiment. From impartial scrutiny of the past (such impartiality being, in fact, a naïve illusion) should emerge those statistical patterns, those periodicities of national and economic force, which allow the historian to formulate “laws of history.” This very notion of historical “law,” and the implication of necessity and predictability, which are crucial to Taine, Marx, and Spengler, are a borrowing from the sphere of the exact and mathematical sciences.
The ambitions of scientific rigor and prophecy have seduced much historical writing from its veritable nature, which is art. Much of what passes for history at present is scarcely literate. The disciples of Namier—not he himself—consign Gibbon, Macaulay, or Michelet to the limbo of belles-lettres. The illusion of science and the fashions of the academic tend to transform the young historian into a lean ferret gnawing at the minute fact or figure. He dwells in footnotes and writes monographs in as illiterate a style as possible to demonstrate the scientific bias of his craft. One of the few contemporary historians prepared to defend openly the poetic nature of historical imagining is C. V. Wedgwood. She fully concedes that all style brings with it the possibility of distortion: “There is no literary style which may not at some point take away something from the ascertainable outline of truth, which it is the task of scholarship to excavate and re-establish.” But where such excavation abandons style altogether, or harbors the illusion of impartial exactitude, it will light only on dust.
Or consider economics: its classic masters, Adam Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Marshall, were masters of prose style. They relied upon language to explain and persuade. In the late nineteenth century began the development of mathematical economics. Keynes was perhaps the last to span both the humane and the mathematical branches of his science. Discussing the contributions of Ramsey to economic thought, Keynes pointed out that a number of them, though of signal importance, involved mathematics too sophisticated for the layman or the classical economist. Today the gap has widened tremendously; econometrics is gaining on economics. The cardinal terms—theory of values, cycles, productive capacity, liquidity, inflation, input-output—are in a state of transition. They are moving from the linguistic to the mathematical, from rhetoric to equation. The alphabet of modern economics is no longer primarily the word, but rather the chart, the graph, and the number. The most powerful economic thought of the present is using the analytic and predictive instruments forged by the functional analysts of nineteenth-century mathematics.
The temptations of exact science are most flagrant in sociology. Much of present sociology is illiterate, or, more precisely, anti-literate. It is conceived in a jargon of vehement obscurity. Wherever possible, the word and the grammar of literate meaning are replaced by the statistical table, the curve, or the graph. Where it must remain verbal, sociology borrows what it can from the vocabulary of the exact sciences. One could make a fascinating list of these borrowings. Consider only the more prominent: norms, group, scatter, integration, function, coordinates. Each has a specific mathematical or technical content. Emptied of this content and forced into an alien setting, these expressions become blurred and pretentious. They do ill service to their new masters. Yet in using the gibberish of “culture coordinates” and “peer-group integrations” the sociologist pays fervent tribute to the mirage that has haunted all rational inquiry since the seventeenth century—the mirage of mathematical exactitude and predictability.
Nowhere, however, is the retreat from the word more pronounced and startling than in philosophy. Classic and medieval philosophy were wholly committed to the dignity and resources of language, to the belief that words, handled with requisite precision and subtlety, could bring the mind into accord with reality. Plato, Aristotle, Duns Scotus, and Aquinas are master-builders of words, constructing around reality great edifices of statement, definition, and discrimination. They operate with modes of argument that differ from those of the poet; but they share with the poet the assumption that words gather and engender responsible apprehensions of the truth. Again, the turning point occurs in the seventeenth century, with Descartes’ implicit identification of truth and mathematical proof, and, above all, with Spinoza.
The Ethics represents the formidable impact on a philosophic temper of the new mathematics. In mathematics, Spinoza perceived that rigor of statement, that consistency and majestic certitude of result, which are the hope of all metaphysics. Not even the severest of scholastic arguments, with its array of syllogisms and lemmas, could rival that progress from axiom to demonstration and new concept which is to be found in Euclidean and analytic geometry. With superb naïveté, therefore, Spinoza sought to make of the language of philosophy a verbal mathematics. Hence the organization of the Ethics into axioms, definitions, demonstrations, and corollaries. Hence the proud q.e.d. at the close of each set of propositions. It is a queer, entrancing book, as pellucid as the lenses Spinoza ground for a living. But it yields nothing except a further image of itself. It is an elaborate tautology. Unlike numbers, words do not contain within themselves functional operations. Added or divided, they give only other words or approximations of their own meaning. Spinoza’s demonstrations merely affirm; they cannot give proof. Yet the attempt was prophetic. It confronts all subsequent metaphysics with a dilemma; after Spinoza, philosophers know that they are using language to clarify language, like cutters using diamonds to shape other diamonds. Language is seen no longer as a road to demonstrable truth, but as a spiral or gallery of mirrors bringing the intellect back to its point of departure. With Spinoza, metaphysics loses its innocence.
Symbolic logic, a glimpse of which may already be found in Leibniz, is an attempt to break out of the circle. At first, in the work of Boole, Frege, and Hilbert, it was intended as a specialized tool designed to test the internal consistency of mathematical reasoning. But it soon assumed a much larger relevance. The symbolic logician constructs a radically simplified but entirely rigorous and self-consistent model. He invents or postulates a syntax freed from the ambiguities and imprecisions which history and usage have brought into common language. He borrows the conventions of mathematical inference and deduction and applies them to other modes of thought in order to determine whether such modes have validity. In short, he seeks to objectify crucial areas of philosophic inquiry by stepping outside language. The non-verbal instrument of mathematical symbolism is now being applied to morals and even to aesthetics. The old notion of a calculus of moral impulse, of an algebra of pleasure and pain, has had its revival. A number of contemporary logicians have sought to devise a calculable theoretic basis for the act of aesthetic choice. There is scarcely a branch of modern philosophy in which we do not find the numerals, italicized letters, radicals, and arrows with which the symbolic logician seeks to replace the shopworn and rebellious host of words.
The greatest of modern philosophers was also the one most profoundly intent on escaping from the spiral of language. Wittgenstein’s entire work starts out by asking whether there is any verifiable relation between the word and the fact. That which we call fact may well be a veil spun by language to shroud the mind from reality. Wittgenstein compels us to wonder whether reality can be spoken of, when speech is merely a kind of infinite regression, words being spoken of other words. Wittgenstein pursued this dilemma with passionate austerity. The famous closing proposition of the Tractatus is not a claim for the potentiality of philosophic statement such as Descartes advanced. On the contrary; it is a drastic retreat from the confident authority of traditional metaphysics. It leads to the equally famous conclusion: “It is clear that Ethics cannot be expressed.” Wittgenstein would include in the class of inexpressibles (what he calls the mystical) most of the traditional areas of philosophic speculation. Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality. The rest, and it is presumably the much larger part, is silence.
Later on, Wittgenstein departed from the restrictive position of the Tractatus. The Philosophic Investigations take a more optimistic view of the inherent capacities of language to describe the world and to articulate certain modes of conduct. But it is an open question whether the Tractatus is not the more powerful and consistent statement. It is certainly deeply felt. For the silence, which at every point surrounds the naked discourse, seems, by virtue of Wittgenstein’s force of insight, less a wall than a window. With Wittgenstein, as with certain poets, we look out of language not into darkness but light. Anyone who reads the Tractatus will be sensible of its odd, mute radiance.
Though I can only touch on the matter briefly, it seems clear to me that the retreat from the authority and range of verbal language plays a tremendous role in the history and character of modern art. In painting and sculpture, realism in the broadest sense—the representation of that which we apprehend as an imitation of existent reality—corresponds to that period in which language is at the center of intellectual and emotive life. A landscape, a still life, a portrait, an allegory, a depiction of some event out of history or legend are renditions in color, volume, and texture of realities which can be expressed in words. We can give a linguistic account of the subject of the work of art. The canvas and the statue have a title that relates them to the verbal concept. We say: this is a portrait of a man with a golden helmet; or, this is the Grand Canal at sunrise; or, this is a portrayal of Daphne turning into a laurel. In each case, even before we have seen the work, the words elicit in the mind a specific graphic equivalent. No doubt this equivalent is less vivid or revealing than the painting by Rembrandt or Canaletto, or the statue by Canova. But there is a substantive relation. The artist and the viewer are talking about the same world, though the artist says things more profound and inclusive.
It is precisely against such verbal equivalence or concordance that modern art has rebelled. It is because so much eighteenth- and nineteenth-century painting seemed merely to be an illustration of verbal concepts—a picture in the book of language—that post-impressionism broke away from the word. Van Gogh declared that the painter paints not what he sees but what he feels. What is seen can be transposed into words; what is felt may occur at some level anterior to language or outside it. It will find expression solely in the specific idiom of color and spatial organization. Non-objective and abstract art rejects the mere possibility of a linguistic equivalent. The canvas or the sculpture refuses to be entitled; it is labeled “Black and White No. 5” or “White Forms” or “Composition 85.” When there is a title, as in many of De Kooning’s canvases, the title is often an ironic mystification; it is not meant to mean but to decorate or bewilder. And the work itself has no subject of which one can render a verbal account. The fact that Lassaw calls his twists of welded bronze “Clouds of Magellan” provides no exterior reference; Franz Kline’s “Chief” (1950) is merely a whorl of paint. Nothing that can be said about it will be pertinent to the habits of linguistic sense. The patches of color, the skein of wire, or the aggregates of cast iron seek to establish reference only to themselves, only inwards.
Where they succeed, their assertion of immediate sensuous energy provokes in the viewer a kinetic response. There are shapes by Brancusi and Arp that draw us after them into a counterpart of their own motion. De Kooning’s “Leaves in Weehawken” by-passes language and seems to play directly on our nerve ends. But more often, the abstract design conveys only the rudimentary pleasures of decoration. Much of Jackson Pollock is vivid wallpaper. And in the majority of cases, abstract expressionism and non-objective art communicate nothing whatever. The work stands mute or attempts to shout at us in a kind of inhuman gibberish. I wonder whether future artists and critics will not look back with puzzled contempt upon the mass of pretentious trivia that now fills our galleries.
The problem of atonal, concrete, or electronic music is, obviously, a very different one. Music is explicitly related to language only where it sets a text, where it is music of a specific formal occasion, or where it is program music seeking to articulate in sound a deliberate scene or situation. Music has always had its own syntax, its own vocabulary and symbolic means. Indeed, it is with mathematics the principal language of the mind when the mind is in a condition of non-verbal feeling. Yet, even within music, there has been a distinct movement away from the reaches of the word.
A classical sonata or symphony is not in any way a verbal statement. Except in very simplified instances (“storm-music”), there is no unilateral equivalent between the tonal event and a particular verbal meaning or emotion. Nevertheless, there is in classical forms of musical organization a certain grammar or articulation in time which does have analogies with the processes of language. Language cannot translate into itself the binary structure of a sonata, but the statement of successive subjects, the fact of variation on them, and the closing recapitulation do convey an ordering of experience to which language has valid parallels. Modern music shows no such relationships. In order to achieve a kind of total integrity and self-containment, it departs violently from the domain of intelligible “exterior” meaning. It denies to the listener any recognition of content, or, more accurately, it denies him the possibility of relating the purely auditive impression to any verbalized form of experience. Like the non-objective canvas, the piece of “new” music will often dispense with a title lest that title offer a false bridge back to the world of pictorial and verbal imaginings. It calls itself “Variation 42” or “Composition.”
In its flight from the neighborhood of language, moreover, music has been drawn inevitably to the chimera of mathematics. Glancing at a recent issue of The Musical Quarterly, one finds a discussion of “Twelve-Tone Invariants”:
The initial pitch class of S is denoted by the couple (0,0), and is taken as the origin of the co-ordinate system for both order and pitch numbers, both of which range over the integers 0–11 inclusive, each integer appearing once and only once as an order number and a pitch number. In the case of order numbers, this represents the fact that twelve and only twelve pitch classes are involved: in the case of pitch numbers, this is the arithmetical analogue of octave equivalence (congruent mod. 12).
Describing his own method of composition, a contemporary composer, by no means among the most radical, observes:
The point is that the notion of invariancy inherent by definition to the concept of the series, if applied to all parameters, leads to a uniformity of configurations that eliminates the last traces of unpredictability, or surprise.
The music that is produced by this kind of approach may be of considerable fascination and technical interest. But the vision behind it is clearly related to the great crisis of humane literacy. And only those committed by profession or affectation to the ultra-modern would deny that much of what passes for music at the present time is brutal noise.
II
What I have argued so far is this: until the seventeenth century, the sphere of language encompassed nearly the whole of experience and reality; today, it comprises a narrower domain. It no longer articulates, or is relevant to, all major modes of action, thought, and sensibility. Large areas of meaning and praxis now belong to such non-verbal languages as mathematics, symbolic logic, and formulas of chemical or electronic relation. Other areas belong to the sublanguages or anti-languages of non-objective art and musique concrète. The world of words has shrunk. One cannot talk of transfinite numbers except mathematically; one should not, suggests Wittgenstein, talk of ethics or aesthetics within the presently available categories of discourse. And it is, I think, exceedingly difficult to speak meaningfully of a Jackson Pollock painting or a composition by Stockhausen. The circle has narrowed tremendously, for was there anything under heaven, be it science, metaphysics, art, or music, of which a Shakespeare, a Donne, and a Milton could not speak naturally, to which their words did not have natural access?
Does this signify that fewer words are in actual use today? That is a very intricate and, as yet, unresolved question. Not including taxonomic lists (the names of all species of beetles, for example), it is estimated that the English language at present contains some 600,000 words. Elizabethan English is thought to have had only 150,000. But these rough figures are deceptive. Shakespeare’s working vocabulary exceeds that of any later author, and the King James Bible, although it requires only 6000 words, suggests that the conception of literacy prevailing at the time was far more comprehensive than ours. The real point lies not in the number of words potentially available, but in the degree to which the resources of the language are in actual current use. If McKnight’s estimate is reliable (English Words and Their Background, 1923), fifty percent of modern colloquial speech in England and America comprises only thirty-four basic words; and to make themselves widely understood, contemporary media of mass communication have had to reduce English to a semi-literate condition. The language of Shakespeare and Milton belongs to a stage of history in which words were in natural control of experienced life. The writer of today tends to use far fewer and simpler words, both because mass culture has watered down the concept of literacy and because the sum of realities of which words can give a necessary and sufficient account has sharply diminished.
This diminution—the fact that the image of the world is receding from the communicative grasp of the word—has had its impact on the quality of language. As Western consciousness has become less dependent on the resources of language to order experience and conduct the business of the mind, the words themselves seem to have lost some of their precision and vitality. This is, I know, a controversial notion. It assumes that language has a “life” of its own in a sense that goes beyond metaphor. It implies that such concepts as tiredness and corruption are relevant to language itself, not only to men’s use of it. It is a view held by De Maistre and Orwell, and it gives force to Pound’s definition of the poet’s job: “We are governed by words, the laws are graven in words, and literature is the sole means of keeping these words living and accurate.” Most linguists would regard implications of internal, independent vitality in language as suspect. But let me indicate briefly what I mean.
There is in the handling of the English language in the Tudor, Elizabethan, and Jacobean periods a sense of discovery, of exuberant acquisition, which has never been wholly recaptured. Marlowe, Bacon, Shakespeare use words as if they were new, as if no previous touch had clouded their shimmer or muted their resonance. Erasmus tells of how he bent down in a muddy lane ecstatically when his eye lit upon a scrap of print, so new was the miracle of the printed page. This is how the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries seem to look upon language itself. The great treasure of it lies before them, suddenly unlocked, and they ransack it with a sense of infinite resource. The instrument now in our hands, on the contrary, is worn by long usage. And the demands of mass culture and mass communication have made it perform tasks of ever increasing tawdriness.
What save half-truths, gross simplifications, or trivia can, in fact, be communicated to that semi-literate mass audience which popular democracy has summoned into the market place? Only in a diminished or corrupted language can most such communication be made effective. Compare the vitality of language implicit in Shakespeare, in the Book of Common Prayer, or in the style of a country gentleman such as Cavendish, with our present vulgate. “Motivation researchers,” those gravediggers of literate speech, tell us that the perfect advertisement should neither contain words of more than two syllables nor sentences with dependent clauses. In the United States, millions of copies have been printed of “Shakespeare” and the “Bible” in the form of comic strips with captions in basic English. Surely there can be no doubt that the access to economic and political power of the semi-educated has brought with it a drastic reduction in the wealth and dignity of speech.
I have tried to show elsewhere, in reference to the condition of German speech under Nazism, what political bestiality and falsehood can make of a language when the latter has been severed from the roots of moral and emotional life, when it has become ossified with clichés, unexamined definitions, and leftover words. What has happened to German is, however, happening less dramatically elsewhere. The language of the mass media and of advertisement in England and the United States, what passes for literacy in the average American high school or the style of present political debate, are manifest proofs of a retreat from vitality and precision. The English spoken by Mr. Eisenhower during his press conferences, like that used to sell a new detergent, was intended neither to communicate the critical truths of national life nor to quicken the mind of the hearer. It was designed to evade or gloss over the demands of meaning. The language of a community has reached a perilous state when a study of radioactive fall-out can be entitled “Operation Sunshine.”
Whether it is a decline in the life-force of the language itself that helps bring on the cheapening and dissolution of moral and political values, or whether it is a decline in the vitality of the body politic that undermines the language, one thing is clear. The instrument available to the modern writer is threatened by restriction from without and decay from within. In the world of what R. P. Blackmur calls “the new illiteracy,” the man to whom the highest literacy is of the essence, the writer, finds himself in a precarious situation.
What I want to examine next is the effect on the actual practice of literature of the retreat from the word and the concomitant divisions and diminutions of our culture. Not, of course, on all Western literature, nor even on a significant fraction. But only on certain literary movements and individual writers who seem exemplary of the larger withdrawal.
III
The crisis of poetic means, as we now know it, began in the later nineteenth century. It arose from awareness of the gap between the new sense of psychological reality and the old modes of rhetorical and poetic statement. In order to articulate the wealth of consciousness opened to the modern sensibility, a number of poets sought to break out of the traditional confines of syntax and definition. Rimbaud, Lautréamont, and Mallarmé strove to restore to language a fluid, provisional character; they hoped to give back to the word the power of incantation—of conjuring up the unprecedented—which it possesses when it is still a form of magic. They realized that traditional syntax organizes our perceptions into linear and monistic patterns. Such patterns distort or stifle the play of subconscious energies, the multitudinous life of the interior of the mind, as it was revealed by Blake, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, and Freud. In his prose poems, Rimbaud seeks to liberate language from the innate bond of causal sequence; effects seem to come before causes and events unfold in inconsequent simultaneity. That became a characteristic conceit of surrealism. Mallarmé made of words acts not primarily of communication but of initiation into a private mystery. Mallarmé uses current words in occult and riddling senses; we recognize them but they turn their back on us.
Although they yield superb poetry, these conceptions are fraught with danger. To work at all, the new private language must have behind it the pressure of genius; mere talent, a far more available commodity, will not do. Only genius can elaborate a vision so intense and specific that it will come across the intervening barrier of broken syntax or private meaning. The modern poet uses words as a private notation, access to which is rendered increasingly difficult for the common reader. Where a master is at work, where privacy of means is an instrument of heightened perception and no mere artifice, the reader will be led toward the necessary effort. Even before one has grasped Rimbaud’s vision or the eccentric structure of argument in the Duino Elegies, one is aware that Rimbaud and Rilke are using language in new ways in order to pass from the real to the more real. But in the hands of lesser men or impostors, the attempt to make language new is diminished to barrenness and obscurity. Dylan Thomas is a case in point. He realized, with the flair of a showman, that a wide, largely unqualified audience could be flattered by being given access to a poetry of seeming depth. He combined a froth of Swinburnean rhetoric with cabalistic devices of syntax and imagery. He showed that one could have one’s Orphic cake and eat it too. But barring certain eloquent exceptions, there is in his poems less than meets the dazzled eye.
Where poetry seeks to dissociate itself from the exactions of clear meaning and from the common usages of syntax, it will tend toward an ideal of musical form. This tendency plays a fascinating role in modern literature. The thought of giving to words and prosody values equivalent to music is an ancient one. But with French Symbolist poetry, it assumes specific force. Implicit in Verlaine’s doctrine—De la musique avant toute chose—is the attractive but confused notion that a poem should communicate most immediately through its sonorities. This pursuit of the tonal rather than the conceptual mode produced series of poetic works which yield their full implications only when they are actually set to music. Debussy was able to use Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande nearly intact; the same is true of Richard Strauss and Wilde’s Salomé. In either case, the poetic work is a libretto in search of a composer. The musical values and proceedings are already explicit in the language.
More recently, the submission of literary forms to musical examples and ideals has been carried even further. In Romain Rolland and Thomas Mann, we find the belief that the musician is the artist in essence (he is more an artist than, say, the painter or writer). This is because only music can achieve that total fusion of form and content, of means and meaning, which all art strives for. Two of the foremost poetic designs of our time, T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and Hermann Broch’s Death of Virgil, embody an idea that can be traced back to Mallarmé and L’Après-midi d’un faune: they attempt to suggest in language corresponding organizations of musical form.
The Death of Virgil is a novel built in four sections, each of which is figurative of one of the four movements of a quartet. Indeed, there are hints that Broch had before him the structure of a particular late quartet of Beethoven. In each “movement,” the cadence of the prose is meant to reflect a corresponding musical tempo: there is a swift “scherzo” in which plot, dialogue, and narrative move at a sharp pace; in the “andante,” Broch’s style slows down to long, sinuous phrases. The last section, which renders Virgil’s actual passage into death, is an astounding performance. It goes beyond Joyce in loosening the traditional bonds of narrative. The words literally flow in sustained polyphony. Strands of argument interweave exactly as in a string quartet; there are fugal developments in which images are repeated at governed intervals; and, at the last, language gathers to a dim, sensuous rush as remembrance, present awareness, and prophetic intimation join in a single great chord. The entire novel, in fact, is an attempt to transcend language toward more delicate and precise conveyances of meaning. In the last sentence, the poet crosses into death, realizing that that which is wholly outside language is outside life.
There is a sociological footnote relevant to these turnings of literature toward music. In the United States, and to a growing extent in Europe, the new literacy is musical rather than verbal. The long-playing record has revolutionized the art of leisure. The new middle class in the affluent society reads little, but listens to music with knowing delight. Where the library shelves once stood, there are proud, esoteric rows of record albums and high-fidelity components. Compared to the long-playing record, the paperback book is an ephemeral, lightly discarded thing. It does not lead to the collecting of a real library. Music is today the central fact of lay culture. Few adults read aloud to each other; fewer yet spend a regular part of their spare time in a public library or athenaeum as did the generation of the 1880s. Many gather before the hi-fi set or join in musical performance.
There are complex social and psychological reasons for this. The tempo of urban and industrial life leaves one exhausted at nightfall. When one is tired, music, even difficult music, is easier to enjoy than serious literature. It stirs feeling without perplexing the brain. It allows even those who have little previous training access to classic masterpieces. It does not separate human beings into islands of privacy and silence as does the reading of a book, but conjoins them in that illusion of community which our society strives for. Where Victorian wooers sent garlands of verse to their intended, the modern swain will choose a record explicitly meant as background to reverie or seduction. As one looks at recent album-covers, one realizes that music has become the substitute for the candlelight and dark velvets which our style of life no longer provides.
In short, the musical sound, and to a lesser degree the work of art and its reproduction, are beginning to hold a place in literate society once firmly held by the word.
What is, perhaps, the dominant school in contemporary literature has made a virtue of necessity. The style of Hemingway and of his myriad imitators is a brilliant response to the diminution of linguistic possibility. Sparse, laconic, highly artificial in its conventions of brevity and understatement, that style sought to reduce the ideal of Flaubert—le mot juste—to a scale of basic language. One may admire it or not. But, undeniably, it is based on a most narrow conception of the resources of literacy. Moreover, the technical mastery of a Hemingway tends to blur a crucial distinction: simple words can be used to express complex ideas and feelings, as in Tacitus, the Book of Common Prayer, or Swift’s Tale of a Tub; or they can be used to express states of consciousness that are themselves rudimentary. By retrenching language to a kind of powerful, lyric shorthand, Hemingway narrows the compass of observed and rendered life. He is often charged with his monotonous adherence to hunters, fishermen, bullfighters, or alcoholic soldiers. But this constancy is a necessary result of the available medium. How could Hemingway’s language convey the inward life of more manifold or articulate characters? Imagine trying to translate the consciousness of Raskolnikov into the vocabulary of “The Killers.” Which is not to deny the perfection of this grim snapshot. But Crime and Punishment gathers into itself a sum of life entirely beyond Hemingway’s thin medium.
The thinning out of language has condemned much of recent literature to mediocrity. There are various reasons why Death of a Salesman falls short of the discernible reach of Arthur Miller’s talent. But an obvious one is the paucity of its language. The brute snobbish fact is that men who die speaking as does Macbeth are more tragic than those who sputter platitudes in the style of Willy Loman. Miller has learned much from Ibsen; but he has failed to hear behind Ibsen’s realistic conventions the constant beat of poetry.
Language seeks vengeance on those who cripple it. A striking example occurs in O’Neill, a dramatist committed, in a somber and rather moving way, to the practice of bad writing. Interspersed in the sodden morass of A Long Day’s Journey into Night, there are passages from Swinburne. The lines are flamboyant, romantic verbiage. They are meant to show up the adolescent inadequacies of those who recite them. But, in fact, when the play is performed, the contrary occurs. The energy and glitter of Swinburne’s language burn a hole in the surrounding fabric. They elevate the action above its paltry level and instead of showing up the character show up the playwright. Modern authors rarely quote their betters with impunity.
But amid the general retreat or flight from the word in literature, there have been a number of brilliant rearguard actions. I shall cite only a few instances, limiting myself to English.
No doubt the most exuberant counterattack any modern writer has launched against the diminution of language is that of James Joyce. After Shakespeare and Burton, literature has known no greater gourmand of words. As if aware of the fact that science had torn from language many of its former possessions and outer provinces, Joyce chose to annex a new kingdom below ground. Ulysses caught in its bright net the live tangle of subconscious life; Finnegans Wake mines the bastions of sleep. Joyce’s work, more than any since Milton, recalls to the English ear the wide magnificence of its legacy. It marshals great battalions of words, calling back to the ranks words long asleep or rusted, and recruiting new ones by stress of imaginative need.
Yet when we look back on the battle so decisively won, we can attribute to it little positive consequence, and scarcely any wider richening. There have been no genuine successors to Joyce in English; perhaps there can be none to a talent so exhaustive of its own potential. What counts more: the treasures which Joyce brought back to language from his wide-ranging forays remain piled glitteringly around his own labors. They have not passed into currency. They have caused none of that general quickening of the spirit of speech which follows on Spenser and Marlowe. I do not know why. Perhaps the action was fought too late; or perhaps the privacies and parts of incoherence in Finnegans Wake have proved too obtrusive. As it stands, Joyce’s performance is a monument rather than a living force.
Another rear-guard action, or raid behind enemy lines, has been that of Faulkner. The means of Faulkner’s style are primarily those of Gothic and Victorian rhetoric. Within a syntax whose convolutions are themselves expressive of Faulkner’s landscape, ornate, regional language makes a constant assault upon our feelings. Often the words seem to grow cancerous, engendering other words in ungoverned foison. At times, the sense is diluted as in a swamp-mist. But nearly always, this idiosyncratic, Victorian night-parlance is a style. Faulkner is not afraid of words even where they submerge him. And where he is in control of them, Faulkner’s language has a thrust and vital sensuousness that carry all before them. Much in Faulkner is overwritten or even badly written. But the novel is always written through and through. The act of eloquence, which is the very definition of a writer, is not let go by default.
The case of Wallace Stevens is particularly instructive. Here is a poet who was by nature a rhetorician, who saw language as ceremonious and dramatic gesture. He was a lover of the savor and shimmer of words, passing them over his tongue like a taster of rare vintage. Yet the inventions or habits of style most characteristic of his work come from a narrow and brittle source. Consider some of his best-known finds: “bright nouveautés,” “foyer,” “funeste,” “peristyle,” “little arrondissements,” “peignoir,” “fictive,” “port” (in the sense of posture). Most are Latinizations or naked borrowings from the French. They are conceits superimposed on language, not, as in Shakespeare or Joyce, growths from within the natural soil. Where the intent is one of exotic ornament, as in the “tambourines” and “simpering Byzantines” of “Peter Quince,” the effect is memorable. Elsewhere, it is merely florid or rococo. And behind Wallace Stevens’ linguistic acquisitiveness, there is a queer streak of provincialism. He borrows French words with obtrusive excitement, rather like a traveler acquiring French bonnets or perfumes. He once declared that English and French are closely related languages. Not only is the proposition shallow, but it betokens a view of his own idiom which a poet should guard against.
Looking at the present scene, I wonder whether the best hope for a renascence of the word, in the purely literary domain, does not lie with an English novelist of Irish descent and Anglo-Indian background:
Frankly Scobie looks anybody’s age; older than the birth of tragedy, younger than the Athenian death. Spawned in the Ark by a chance meeting and mating of the bear and the ostrich; delivered before term by the sickening grunt of the keel on Ararat. Scobie came forth from the womb in a wheel chair with rubber tyres, dressed in a deer-stalker and a red flannel binder. On his prehensile toes the glossiest pair of elastic-sided boots. In his hand a ravaged family Bible whose fly-leaf bore the words “Joshua Samuel Scobie 1870. Honour thy father and thy mother.” To these possessions were added eyes like dead moons, a distinct curvature of the pirate’s spinal column, and a taste for quinqueremes. It was not blood which flowed in Scobie’s veins but green salt water, deep-sea stuff. His walk is the slow rolling grinding trudge of a saint walking on Galilee. His talk is a green-water jargon swept up in five oceans—an antique shop of polite fable bristling with sextants, astrolabes, propentines and isobars.… Now the retreating tide has left him high and dry above the speeding currents of time, Joshua the insolvent weather-man, the islander, the anchorite.
I know the objections to Lawrence Durrell. His style beats against the present wind. Anyone trained on Hemingway will sicken and cloy at it. But perhaps it is we who are at fault, having been long kept on thin gruel. Durrell’s masters are Burton, Sir Thomas Browne, De Quincey, Conrad. He stands in the old tradition of the fullness of prose. He is attempting to make language once again commensurate with the manifold truths of the experienced world. His attempt has entailed excesses; Durrell is often precious, and his vision of conduct is more flimsy and shallow than are the technical resources at his command. But what he is trying to do is of importance: it is no less than an effort to keep literature literate.
But literature represents, as we have seen, only a small part of the universal crisis. The writer is the guardian and shaper of speech, but he cannot do the job alone. Today, this is truer than ever before. The role of the poet in our society and in the life of words has greatly diminished. Most of the sciences are wholly out of his grasp and he can impose on only a narrow range of the humanities his ideals of clear and inventive discourse. Does this mean that we must abandon to illiterate jargon or pseudo-science those crucial domains of historical, moral, and social inquiry in which the word should still be master? Does this mean that we have no grounds for appeal against the strident muteness of the arts?
There are those who hold out small hope. J. Robert Oppenheimer has pointed out that the breakdown of communication is as grave within the sciences as it is between sciences and humanities. The physicist and mathematician proceed in a growing measure of mutual incomprehension. The biologist and the astronomer look on each other’s work across a gap of silence. Everywhere, knowledge is splintering into intense specialization, guarded by technical languages fewer and fewer of which can be mastered by any individual mind. Our awareness of the complication of reality is such that those unifications or syntheses of understanding which made common speech possible no longer work. Or they work only at the rudimentary level of daily need. Oppenheimer goes further: he indicates that the very attempt to find bridges between languages is misleading. There is no use trying to explain to the layman the reality-concepts of modern mathematics or physics. It cannot be done in any honest, truthful way. To do it by approximate metaphor is to spread falsehood and to foster an illusion of understanding. What is needed, suggests Oppenheimer, is a harsh modesty, an affirmation that common men cannot, in fact, understand most things and that the realities of which even a highly trained intellect has cognizance are few and far between.
With respect to the sciences, this somber view seems unassailable. And perhaps it dooms most knowledge to fragmentation. But we should not readily accede to it in history, ethics, economics, or the analysis and formulation of social and political conduct. Here literacy must reaffirm its authority against jargon. I do not know whether this can be done; but the stakes are high. In our time, the language of politics has become infected with obscurity and madness. No lie is too gross for strenuous expression, no cruelty too abject to find apologia in the verbiage of historicism. Unless we can restore to the words in our newspapers, laws, and political acts some measure of clarity and stringency of meaning, our lives will draw yet nearer to chaos. There will then come to pass a new Dark Ages. The prospect is not remote: “Who knows,” says R. P. Blackmur, “it may be the next age will not express itself in words … at all, for the next age may not be literate in any sense we understand or the last three thousand years understood.”
The poet of the Pervigilium Veneris wrote in a darkening time, amid the breakdown of classic literacy. He knew that the Muses can fall silent:
perdidi musam tacendo, nec me Apollo respicit:
sic Amyclas, cum tacerent, perdidit silentium.
“To perish by silence”: that civilization on which Apollo looks no more will not long endure.
[* I am no longer certain that this is so. Obviously most of the analogies drawn between modern art and developments in the exact sciences are “unrealized metaphors,” fictions of analogy which do not have in them the authority of real experience. Nevertheless, even the illicit metaphor, the term borrowed though misunderstood, may be an essential part of a process of reunification. It is very probable that the sciences will furnish an increasing part of our mythologies and imaginative reference. The vulgarizations, false analogies, even errors of the poet and critic may be a necessary part of the “translation” of science into the common literacy of feeling. And the bare fact that aleatory principles in the arts coincide historically with “indeterminacy” may have a genuine significance. It is the nature of that significance which needs to be felt and shown.]