Both Hebraic and Classical mythology have in them the traces of an ancient fear. The tower broken in Babel and Orpheus torn, the prophet blinded so that sight is yielded for insight, Tamyris killed, Marsyas flayed, his voice turning to the cry of blood in the wind—these tell of a sense, deeper rooted than historical memory, of the miraculous outrage of human speech.
That articulate speech should be the line dividing man from the myriad forms of animate being, that speech should define man’s singular eminence above the silence of the plant and the grunt of the beast—stronger, more cunning, longer of life than he—is classic doctrine well before Aristotle. We find it in Hesiod’s Theogony (584). Man is, to Aristotle, a being of the word 
. How the word came to him is, as Socrates admonishes in the Cratylus, a riddle, a question worth asking so as to goad the mind into play, so as to wake it to the wonder of its communicative genius, but it is not a question to which a certain answer lies in human reach.
Possessed of speech, possessed by it, the word having chosen the grossness and infirmity of man’s condition for its own compelling life, the human person has broken free from the great silence of matter. Or, to use Ibsen’s image: struck with the hammer, the insensate ore has begun to sing.
But this breaking free, the human voice harvesting echo where there was silence before, is both miracle and outrage, sacrament and blasphemy. It is a sharp severance from the world of the animal, man’s begetter and sometime neighbor, the animal who, if we rightly grasp the myths of centaur, satyr, and sphinx, has been inwoven with the very substance of man, and whose instinctive immediacies and shapes of physical being have receded only partially from our own form. This harsh weaning, of which antique mythology is so uneasily conscious, has left its scars. Our own new mythologies take up the theme: in Freud’s grim intimation of man’s backward longing, of his covert wish for re-immersion in an earlier, inarticulate state of organic existence; in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s speculations on man’s selfbanishment, by his Promethean theft of fire (the choice of cooked over raw food), and by his mastery of speech, from the natural rhythms and anonymities of the animal world.
If speaking man has made of the animal his mute servant or enemy—the beasts of the field and forest no longer understand our words when we cry for help—man’s control of the word has also hammered at the door of the gods. More than fire, whose power to illumine or to consume, to spread and to draw inward, it so strangely resembles, speech is the core of man’s mutinous relations to the gods. Through it he apes or challenges their prerogatives. Nimrud’s tower was built of words; Tantalus gossiped, bringing to earth in a vessel of words the secrets of the gods. According to the Neo-Platonic and Johannine metaphor, in the beginning was the Word; but if this Logos, this act and essence of God is, in the last analysis, total communication, the word that creates its own content and truth of being—then what of zoon phonanta, man the speaking animal? He too creates words and creates with words. Can there be a coexistence other than charged with mutual torment and rebellion between the totality of the Logos and the living, world-creating fragments of our own speech? Does the act of speech, which defines man, not also go beyond him in rivalry to God?
In the poet this ambiguity is most pronounced. It is he who guards and multiplies the vital force of speech. In him the old words are kept resonant, and the new are lifted to the common light out of the active dark of individual consciousness. The poet makes in dangerous similitude to the gods. His song is builder of cities; his words have that power which, above all others, the gods would deny to man, the power to bestow enduring life. As Montaigne recognizes of Homer:
Et, à la vérité, je m’estonne souvent que luy, qui a produit et mis en credit au monde plusieurs deitez par son auctorité, n’a gaigné rang de Dieu luy mesme.…
The poet is maker of new gods and preserver of men: thus Achilles and Agamemnon live, Ajax’s great shade is burning still, because the poet has made of speech a dam against oblivion, and death blunts its sharp teeth upon his word. And because our languages have a future tense, which fact is of itself a radiant scandal, a subversion of mortality, the seer, the prophet, men in whom language is in a condition of extreme vitality, are able to look beyond, to make of the word a reaching out past death. For which presumption—to presume means to anticipate but also to usurp—they are grimly taxed.
Homer, the master-builder and rebel against time, in whom the conviction that the “winged word” shall outlast death speaks out in constant jubilation, goes blind. Orpheus is torn to bleeding shreds. Yet the word will not be quenched; it sings in the dead mouth:
membra iacent diversa locis, caput, Hebre, lyramque
excipis: et (mirum!) medio dum labitur amne,
flebile nescio quid queritur lyra, flebile lingua
murmurat exanimis, respondent flebile ripae.
Mirum! says Ovid: a marvel, a wonder, but also a scandal and defiance to the gods. Out of the gates of death man pours the living stream of words. And how may we read the torment of Marsyas, Apollo’s challenger, that cruel fable of lyre against pipe which haunts the Renaissance to the time of Spenser, if not as a warning of the bitter intimacies and necessary vengeances between God and the poet? Poets are not, as officious mythology would have it, sons of Apollo, but of Marsyas. In his death cry they hear their own name:
this is already beyond the endurance
of the god with nerves of artificial fiber
along a gravel path
between box espaliers
the victor departs
wondering
whether out of Marsyas’ howling
there will some day arise
a new brand
of art—let us say—concrete
suddenly
at his feet
falls a petrified nightingale
and sees
that the tree to which Marsyas was fastened
has gone white-haired
completely
(from the Polish of Zbigniew Herbert, translated by Czeslaw Milosz)
To speak, to assume the privileged singularity and solitude of man in the silence of creation, is dangerous. To speak with the utmost strength of the word, which is the poet’s, supremely so. Thus even to the writer, perhaps to him more than to others, silence is a temptation, a refuge when Apollo is near.
Gradually this ambivalence in the genius of language, this notion of the god-rivaling, therefore potentially sacrilegious character of the act of the poet, becomes one of the recurrent tropes in Western literature. From Medieval Latin poetry to Mallarmé and Russian Symbolist verse, the motif of the necessary limitations of the human word is a frequent one. It carries with it a crucial intimation of that which lies outside language, of what it is that awaits the poet if he were to transgress the bounds of human discourse. Being, in the nature of his craft, a reacher, the poet must guard against becoming, in the Faustian term, an overreacher. The daemonic creativity of his instrument probes the outworks of the City of God; he must know when to draw back lest he be consumed, Icarus-like, by the terrible nearness of a greater making, of a Logos incommensurable with his own (in the garden of fallen pleasures, Hieronymus Bosch’s poet is racked on his own harp).
But it is decisively the fact that language does have its frontiers, that it borders on three other modes of statement—light, music, and silence—which gives proof of a transcendent presence in the fabric of the world. It is just because we can go no further, because speech so marvelously fails us, that we experience the certitude of a divine meaning surpassing and enfolding ours. What lies beyond man’s word is eloquent of God. That is the joyously defeated recognition expressed in the poems of St. John of the Cross and of the mystic tradition.
Where the word of the poet ceases, a great light begins. This topos, with its historical antecedents in neo-Platonic and Gnostic doctrine, gives to Dante’s Paradiso its principal motion of spirit. We may understand the Paradiso as an exercise, supremely controlled yet full of extreme moral and poetic risk, in the calculus of linguistic possibility. Language is deliberately extended to the limit case. With each act of ascent, from sphere to radiant sphere, Dante’s language is submitted to more intense and exact pressure of vision; divine revelation stretches the human idiom more and more out of the bounds of daily, indiscriminate usage. By exhaustive metaphor, by the use of similes increasingly audacious and precise—we hear the prayer in the syntax—Dante is able to make verbally intelligible the forms and meanings of his transcendent experience.
The characteristic rhetorical movement is one of initial retreat from the luminous, hermetic challenge, followed by an ingathering of utmost concentration, and a thrust forward into language unprecedented, into analogies and turns of statement which the poet himself discovers, which he had not known previously to lie within his grasp. First there is defeat. Words cannot convey what the pilgrim sees:
Perch’ io lo ingegno, l’arte e l’uso chiami
sì nol direi che mai s’imaginasse.…
(x)
e il canto di quei lumi era di quelle;
chi non s’impenna sìche lassú voli,
dal muto aspetti quindi le novelle.
(x)
The poet seeks refuge in muteness. Whereupon the upward surge, the verbalization of the hitherto incommunicable occurs through some miracle of simplicity, by way of a simile invoking a ball-game, hot wax flowing from the impress of a seal-ring, the shoemaker hammering at his nails. As if the grace of divine meaning were such that it can, under the poet’s persuasion, enter the most natural, straightforward of our imaginings.
But as the poet draws near the Divine presence, the heart of the rose of fire, the labor of translation into speech grows ever more exacting. Words grow less and less adequate to the task of translating immediate revelation. Light passes to a diminishing degree into speech; instead of making syntax translucent with meaning, it seems to spill over in unrecapturable splendor or burn the word to ash. This is the drama of the final Cantos. As the poet moves upward his words fall behind. Until, in verse 55 of Canto xxxiii il parlar nostro, our human discourse, fails utterly:
Da quinci innanzi il mio veder fu maggio
che il parlar nostro ch’ a tal vista cede,
e cede la memoria a tanto oltraggio.
Words failing, memory, which is their confine, breaks also. This is an outrage (oltraggio); but it is a sacred, affirmative outrage, a manifest proof of being of that which surpasses all human speech. From that literally unspeakable light and glory, the tongue of the poet strives to bring back to us one single spark:
e fa la lingua mia tanto possente
ch’une favilla sol della tua gloria
possa lasciare alla futura gente.…
After which speech yields entirely to the inexpressible language of light, and the poet, at the absolute summit of his powers, compares his art unfavorably with the inarticulate babblings of an unweaned child:
Omai sarà piú corta mia favella,
pure a quel ch’ io ricordo, che di un fante
che bagni ancor la lingua alla mammella.
The circle is complete: at its furthest reach, where it borders on light, the language of men becomes inarticulate as is that of the infant before he masters words. Those who would press language beyond its divinely ordained sphere, who would contract the Logos into the word, mistake both the genius of speech and the untranslatable immediacy of revelation. They thrust their hands into fire instead of gathering light. That directed light beams (lasers) would one day become carriers of the word might have seemed to Dante a wondrous but not irrational adjunct to his vision.
One tradition finds light at the limits of language. Another, no less ancient or active in our poetry and poetics, finds music.
The interpenetration of poetry and music is so close that their origin is indivisible and usually rooted in a common myth. Still today the vocabulary of prosody and poetic form, of linguistic tonality and cadence, overlaps deliberately with that of music. From Arion and Orpheus to Ezra Pound and John Berryman, the poet is maker of songs and singer of words. There are many and intricate strains (itself a musical term) in the concept of the musical character of poetic speech. The fortunes of Orpheus, as we follow them in Pindar and Ovid, in Spenser, Rilke, and Cocteau, are almost synonymous with the nature and functions of poetry. Because he is part Orpheus, the poet in Western literature is architect of myth, magician over savagery, and pilgrim toward death. The notion that the structure of the universe is ordered by harmony, that there is a music whose modes are the elements, the concord of the planetary orbits, the chime of water and blood, is ancient as Pythagoras and has never lost its metaphoric life. Until the seventeenth century and the “untuning of the sky,” a belief in the music of the spheres, in Pythagorean or Keplerian accords and temperance between star and planet, between harmonious functions in mathematics and the vibrant lute string, underlies much of the poet’s realization of his own action. The music of the spheres is guarantor and counterpoint to his own use of ordering, harmonious “numbers” (the terminology of rhetoric is consistently musical).
Hearkening to this music, as does Lorenzo in the garden at Belmont, he receives not only echo but that assurance of a transcendent presence, of a convention of statement and communication reaching beyond and concentric to his own which Dante receives from exceeding light:
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with patens of bright gold.
There’s not the smallest orb which thou behold’st
But in his motion like an angel sings,
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubins;
Such harmony is in immortal souls!
Patens are the small flat dishes used in Holy Communion—by which choice of word Shakespeare would have us note that communion and communication through transcendent harmony are vitally akin.
From this vast topic of the interactions of music with language, I want to abstract only one theme: the notion that poetry leads toward music, that it passes into music when it attains the maximal intensity of its being. This idea has the evident, powerful implication that music is, in the final analysis, superior to language, that it says more or more immediately. The thought of rivalry between poet and musician is antithetical to the origins and full realization of both; it rends Orpheus more decisively than did the women of Thrace. Yet it too has its long, though often subterranean history. We find evidence of it in Plato’s arguments on the respective functions of poetry and music in education, and in Patristic beliefs, which are at once related to Platonism but different in stress and conclusion, on the irrational, perhaps daemonic powers of music as contrasted with the rationality and verifiability of the word. In the Johannine beginning is the Word; in the Pythagorean, the accord. The rival claims of singer and speaker, moreover, are a Renaissance topos long before they find comic echo in Molière’s Bourgeois Gentilhomme and in Richard Strauss’s uses of Molière and of the music-language quarrel in Ariadne. The possible blackness of that quarrel, the way in which it may search out and articulate the soul’s relationship to God, is at the heart of Mann’s Doctor Faustus.
But it is not the contest I want to draw attention to: it is the recurrent acknowledgment by poets, by masters of language, that music is the deeper, more numinous code, that language, when truly apprehended, aspires to the condition of music and is brought, by the genius of the poet, to the threshold of that condition. By a gradual loosening or transcendence of its own forms, the poem strives to escape from the linear, denotative, logically determined bonds of linguistic syntax into what the poet takes to be the simultaneities, immediacies, and free play of musical form. It is in music that the poet hopes to find the paradox resolved of an act of creation singular to the creator, bearing the shape of his own spirit, yet infinitely renewed in each listener.
The fullest statement of this hope, of this submission of the word to the musical ideal, can be found in German Romanticism. It is in the writings and indeed personal lives of Tieck, Novalis, Wackenroder, E. T. A. Hoffmann, that the theory of music as the supreme, quintessential art, and of the word as its prelude and servant, is carried to the highest pitch of technical and philosophic implication. Novalis’ Hymns to the Night turn on a metaphor of cosmic musicality; they image the spirit of man as a lyre played upon by elemental harmonies, and seek to exalt language to that state of rhapsodic obscurity, of nocturnal dissolution from which it may most naturally pass into song. From Hoffmann to Mann’s Adrian Leverkühn, the artist is, archetypally, a musician; for it is in music, far more than in speech or the plastic arts, that aesthetic conventions are brought near to the source of pure creative energy, that their roots in the subconscious and in the Faustian core of life itself are most nearly touched.
These writers were not necessarily of the first rank; but it would be difficult to exaggerate their influence on the European sensibility. Through them the idea of “correspondence”—all sensory stimuli are interchangeable and interwoven dialects in a universal language of perception—the belief in the uniquely generative character of musical composition, in its “privileged daemonism,” and the key idea that verbal language is in some manner a lesser thing than music but a road toward it, pass into the repertoire of romantic, symbolist, and modern feeling. These writers prepared Wagner, and their premonitions found in him, and partially in Nietzsche, an extraordinary fulfillment.
Wagner pertains to language and the history of ideas as richly as he does to music (in the very long run perhaps more so). He made of the relationships between language and music the crux of his vision. In the Gesamtkunstwerk the upward aspiration of word toward musical tone and the latent antagonism between the two modes of statement were to be conjoined in a synthesis of total expression. In the love-duet of Act II of Tristan the words dim to outcry, to a stutter of swooning consciousness (deliberately infantile as is the stutter of the poet at the summit of the Paradiso), and pass through virtuosity of sonorous appropriation into something that is no longer speech. Music reaches out into this twilight zone to enclose the word in its own more comprehensive syntax. What is not entirely manifest in Wagner’s theory becomes so in fact: music is master of the bargain. Aspiring to synthesis, or more exactly to organic coexistence, language loses the authority of rational statement, of designation through governed structure, which are its proper genius.
The Wagnerian influence on literary aesthetics from Baudelaire to Proust, and on the philosophy of language from Nietzsche to the early Valéry was immense. It brings with it two distinct yet related motifs: the exultation of the poet at being almost musician (a vision of self at work no less in Mallarmé than in Auden); but also a sad condescension to the verbal medium, a despair at being restricted to a form of expression thinner, narrower, much nearer the surface of the creative mind than is music. Thus Valéry to Gide in April 1891:
Je suis dans Lohengrin jusqu’ aux yeux.… Cette musique m’aménera, cela se prépare, à ne plus écrire. Déjà trop de difficultés m’arrêtent. Narcisse a parlé dans le dé sert … être si loin de son rêve.… Et puis quelle page écrite arrive à la hauteur des quelques notes qui sont le motif du Graal?
Something of this haughty exasperation certainly survives in Valéry’s later view of poetry as a mere “exercise” or “game” akin to mathematics and by no means superior to it.
“What written page can attain the heights of the few notes of the Grail motif?” The question and the implicit ordering of linguistic and musical means is current in the whole Symbolist movement. It is most carefully worked out in the poetry of Rilke, in Rilke’s determination to guard both the genius of language and its rights of kinship to music. Rilke celebrates the power of language to rise toward music; the poet is the chosen instrument of that upward transmutation. But the metamorphosis can be achieved only if language preserves the identity of its striving, if it remains itself in the very act of change. In the Sonnets to Orpheus language meditates with delicate precision on its own limits; the word is poised for the transforming rush of music. Yet Rilke, who always works on the frontier between both, recognizes that something is dissolved, perhaps lost, in the crowning change:
Gesang, wie du ihn lehrst, ist nicht Begehr,
nicht Werbung um ein endlich noch Erreichtes;
Gesang ist Dasein. Für den Gott ein Leichtes.
Wann aber sind wir? Und wann wendet er
an unser Sein die Erde und die Sterne?
Dies ists nicht, Jüngling, dass du liebst, wenn auch
die Stimme dann den Mund dir aufstösst,—lerne
vergessen, dass du aufsangst. Das verrinnt.
In Wahrheit singen, ist ein andrer Hauch.
Ein Hauch um nichts. Ein Wehn im Gott. Ein Wind.
The principal moods and energies of Symbolism and of the Wagnerian dialectic of musical totality now lie behind us. But the idea that music is deeper, more comprehensive than language, that it rises with immediacy from the sources of our being, has not lost its relevance and fascination. As has often been observed, the attempt to deepen or reinforce a literary structure by means of musical analogy is frequent in modern poetry and fiction (in the Four Quartets, in Proust, in Broch’s Death of Virgil). But the impulse toward a musical ideal is more far-reaching.
There is a widespread intimation, though as yet only vaguely defined, of a certain exhaustion of verbal resources in modern civilization, of a brutalization and devaluation of the word in the mass-cultures and mass-politics of the age. What more is there to say? How can that which is novel and discriminating enough to be worth saying get a hearing amid the clamor of verbal inflation? The word, especially in its sequential, typographic forms, may have been an imperfect, perhaps transitory code. Music alone can fulfill the two requirements of a truly rigorous communicative or semiological system: to be unique to itself (untranslatable) yet immediately comprehensible. Thus (in defiance, I think, of the specialized conventions of different musical “languages”) argues Lévi-Strauss. He characterizes the composer, the inventor of melody, as un être pareil aux dieux even as Homer was characterized by Montaigne. Lévi-Strauss sees in music le suprême mystère des sciences de l’homme, celui contre lequel elles butent, et qui garde la clé de leur progrès. In music our deafened lives may regain a sense of the inward motion and temperance of individual being, and our societies something of a lost vision of human accord. Through music the arts and exact sciences may reach a common syntax.
We are back with Pythagoras or, more humbly, we live in rooms in which the record-cabinet has replaced the bookshelf.
Although they go beyond language, leaving verbal communication behind, both the translation into light and the metamorphosis into music are positive spiritual acts. Where it ceases or suffers radical mutation, the word bears witness to an inexpressible reality or to a syntax more supple, more penetrating than its own.
But there is a third mode of transcendence: in it language simply ceases, and the motion of spirit gives no further outward manifestation of its being. The poet enters into silence. Here the word borders not on radiance or music, but on night.
This election of silence by the most articulate is, I believe, historically recent. The strategic myth of the philosopher who chooses silence because of the ineffable purity of his vision or because of the unreadiness of his audience has antique precedent. It contributes to the motif of Empedocles on Aetna and to the gnomic aloofness of Heraclitus. But the poet’s choice of silence, the writer relinquishing his articulate enactment of identity in mid-course, is something new. It occurs, as an experience obviously singular but formidable in general implication, in two of the principal masters, shapers, heraldic presences if you will, of the modern spirit: in Hölderlin and Rimbaud.
Each is among the foremost poets of his language. Each carried the written word to the far places of syntactic and perceptual possibility. In Hölderlin German verse attains an unsurpassed concentration, purity, and wholeness of realized form. There is no European poetry more mature, more inevitable in the sense of excluding from itself any looser, more prosaic order. A poem by Hölderlin fills a gap in the idiom of human experience with abrupt, complete necessity, though we had not previously known such a gap to exist. With Rimbaud poetry demands and is accorded the freedom of the modern city—those privileges of indirection, of technical autonomy, of inward reference and sub-surface rhetoric which almost define the twentieth-century style. Rimbaud left his thumbprint on language, on the name and nature of the modern poet, as Cézanne did on apples.
Yet as important as the work itself is the intense after-life of Hölderlin and Rimbaud in the mythology, in the active metaphors of the modern literary condition. Beyond the poems, almost stronger than they, is the fact of renunciation, the chosen silence.
By the age of thirty Hölderlin had accomplished nearly his whole work; a few years later he entered on a quiet madness which lasted thirty-six years, but during which there were a few sparks of the old lucid power (the famous quatrain written down, apparently impromptu, in April 1812). At eighteen Rimbaud completed the Saison en enfer, and embarked on the other hell of Sudanese commerce and Ethiopian gun-running. From it he poured out a deluge of exasperated letters; they bear the marks of his temper and harsh concision, but contain no line of poetry or reference to the work of genius left behind. In both cases, the precise motives and genesis of silence remain obscure. But the myths of language and poetic function that spring from the silence are clear and constitute a shaping legacy.
Hölderlin’s silence has been read not as a negation of his poetry but as, in some sense, its unfolding and its sovereign logic. The gathering strength of stillness within and between the lines of the poems have been felt as a primary element of their genius. As empty space is so expressly a part of modern painting and sculpture, as the silent intervals are so integral to a composition by Webern, so the void places in Hölderlin’s poems, particularly in the late fragments, seem indispensable to the completion of the poetic act. His posthumous life in a shell of quiet, similar to that of Nietzsche, stands for the word’s surpassing of itself, for its realization not in another medium but in that which is its echoing antithesis and defining negation, silence.
Rimbaud’s abdication is seen to have a very different sense. It signifies the elevation of action over word. “Speech that leads not to action,” wrote Carlyle, “still more that hinders it, is a nuisance on the Earth.” Having mastered and exhausted the resources of language as only a supreme poet can, Rimbaud turns to that nobler language which is the deed. The child dreams and babbles; the man does.
Both gestures of sensibility, both theoretic models, have exercised tremendous influence. This revaluation of silence—in the epistemology of Wittgenstein, in the aesthetics of Webern and Cage, in the poetics of Beckett—is one of the most original, characteristic acts of the modern spirit. The conceit of the word unspoken, of the music unheard and therefore richer is, in Keats, a local paradox, a neo-Platonic ornament. In much modern poetry silence represents the claims of the ideal; to speak is to say less. To Rilke the temptations of silence were inseparable from the hazard of the poetic act:
Was spielst du, Knabe? Durck die Gärten gings
wie viele Schritte, flüsternde Befehle.
Was spielst du, Knabe? Siehe deine Seele
verfing sich in den Stäben der Syrinx.
Was lockst du sie? Der Klang ist wie ein Kerker,
darin sie sich versaümt und sich versehnt;
stark ist dein Leben, doch dein Lied ist stärker,
an deine Sehnsucht schluchzend angelehnt.
Gieb ihr ein Schweigen, dass die Seele leise
heimkehre in das Flutende und Viele,
darin sie lebte, wachsend, weit und weise,
eh du sie zwangst in deine zarten Spiele.
Wie sie schon matter mit den Flügeln schlägt:
so wirst du, Traümer, ihren Flug vergeuden,
dass ihre Schwinge, vom Gesang zersägt,
sie nicht mehr über meine Mauern trägt,
wenn ich sie rufen werde zu den Freuden.
This sense of the work of art as entrapped, diminished when it is given articulate form and thus enters into a condition where it is both static and public, is not mystical, though it borrows some of the traditional tones of mysticism. It is grounded in historical circumstance, in a late stage of linguistic and formal civilization in which the expressive achievements of the past seem to weigh exhaustively on the possibilities of the present, in which word and genre seem tarnished, flattened to the touch, like coin too long in circulation. It is also part of a recognition, developed during the Romantic movement and given new metaphors of rationality by Freud, that art, so far as it is public communication, must share in a common code of surface meaning, that it necessarily impoverishes and generalizes the unique, individual life-force of unconscious creation. Ideally each poet should have his own language, singular to his expressive need; given the social, conventionalized nature of human speech, such language can only be silence.
But neither the paradox of silence as the final logic of poetic speech nor the exaltation of action over verbal statement, which is so strong a current in romantic existentialism, accounts for what is probably the most honest temptation to silence in contemporary feeling. There is a third and more powerful impulse, dating from circa 1914. As Mrs. Bickle expresses it in the closing sentence of that black comedy of novelist and recalcitrant subject, James Purdy’s Cabot Wright Begins, “I won’t be a writer in a place and time like the present.”
The possibility that the political inhumanity of the twentieth century and certain elements in the technological mass-society which has followed on the erosion of European bourgeois values have done injury to language is the underlying theme of this book. In different essays I have discussed specific aspects of linguistic devaluation and dehumanization.
To a writer who feels that the condition of language is in question, that the word may be losing something of its humane genius, two essential courses are available: he may seek to render his own idiom representative of the general crisis, to convey through it the precariousness and vulnerability of the communicative act; or he may choose the suicidal rhetoric of silence. The sources and development of both attitudes can be seen most clearly in modern German literature, written as it is in the language which has most fully embodied and undergone the grammar of the inhuman.
To Kafka—and this is the core of his representative role in modern letters—the act of writing was a miraculous scandal. The live nakedness of his style takes no syllable for granted. Kafka names all things anew in a second Garden full of ash and doubt. Hence the tormented scruple of his every linguistic proposal. The Letters to Milena (they are the finest of modern love letters, the least dispensable) come back and back to the impossibility of adequate statement, to the hopelessness of the writer’s task which is to find language as yet unsullied, worn to cliché made empty by unmeditated waste. Arrested, in his own life and background, between conflicting idioms (Czech, German, Hebrew), Kafka was able to approach the very act of speech from outside. Listening to the mystery of language with more acute humility than ordinary men, he heard the jargon of death growing loud inside the European vulgate. Not in any vague, allegoric sense, but with exact prophecy. From the literal nightmare of The Metamorphosis came the knowledge that Ungeziefer (“vermin”) was to be the designation of millions of men. The bureaucratic parlance of The Trial and The Castle have become commonplace in our herded lives. The instrument of torture in “In the Penal Colony” is also a printing press. In short, Kafka heard the name Buchenwald in the word birchwood. He understood, as if the bush had burned for him again, that a great inhumanity was lying in wait for European man, and that parts of language would serve it and be made base in the process (one thinks of the modulations from “central intelligence” in the fiction of Henry James to Central Intelligence in Washington). In such a time the act of writing might be either frivolous—the cry in the poem smothering or beautifying the cry in the street—or altogether impossible. Kafka found metaphoric expression for both alternatives.
So did Hofmannsthal in the most mature, elusive of his comedies, Der Schwierige. Momentarily buried alive in the trenches, Hans Karl Bühl returns from the wars profoundly distrustful of language. To use words as if they could truly convey the pulse and bewilderments of human feeling, to entrust the quick of the human spirit to the inflated currency of social conversation, is to commit self-deception and “indecency” (the key word in the play). “I understand myself much less well when I speak than when I am silent,” says Bühl. Asked to orate in the Upper House on the high theme of the “reconciliation of nations,” Kari draws back with fastidious, pessimistic insight. To open one’s mouth on such a topic is to “wreak unholy confusion.” The very fact that one sees to say certain things “is an indecency.” The close contemporaneity between Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and the parables of silence in Hofmannsthal and other German and Austrian writers of the 1920s needs study. An estrangement from language was, presumably, a part of a more general abandonment of confidence in the stabilities and expressive authority of central European civilization.
Nine years after Kafka’s death, on the eve of actual barbarism, Schoenberg concluded Moses und Aron with the cry “O word, thou word that I lack.” At almost the same time, the incompatibility between eloquence, the poet’s primary delight in speech, and the inhuman nature of political reality, became the theme of the art of Hermann Broch.
Because their language had served at Belsen, because words could be found for all those things and men were not struck dumb for using them, a number of German writers who had gone into exile or survived Nazism, despaired of their instrument. In his Song of Exile, Karl Wolfskehl proclaimed that the true word, the tongue of the living spirit, was dead:
Und ob ihr tausend Worte habt:
Das Wort, das Wort ist tot.
Elisabeth Borcher said: “I break open stars and find nothing, and again nothing, and then a word in a foreign tongue.” A conclusion to an exercise in linguistic-logical analysis, which Wittgenstein carefully stripped of all emotive reference, though he stated it in a mode strangely poetic, strangely reminiscent of the atmosphere of Hölderlin’s notes on Sophocles, of Lichtenberg’s aphorisms, had turned to a grim truth, to a precept of self-destructive humanity for the poet. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
But this sense of a death in language, of the failure of the word in the face of the inhuman, is by no means limited to German.
During the political crisis of 1938, Adamov asked himself whether the thought of being a writer was not an untimely joke, whether the writer would ever again, in European civilization, have a living, humane idiom with which to work:
Le nom de Dieu ne devrait plus jaillir de la bouche de l’homme. Ce mot dégradé par l’usage, depuis si longtemps, ne signifie plus rien. Il est vidé de tout sens, de tout sang.… Les mots, ces gardiens du sens ne sont pas immortels, invulnérables.… Comme les hommes, les mots souffrent.… Certains peuvent survivre, d’autres sont incurables. … Dans la nuit tout se confond, il n’y a plus de noms, plus de formes.
When war came, he wrote: “Worn, threadbare, filed down, words have become the carcass of words, phantom words; everyone drearily chews and regurgitates the sound of them between their jaws.”
More recently, Ionesco has published the following from his Journal:
It is as if, through becoming involved in literature, I had used up all possible symbols without really penetrating their meaning. They no longer have any vital significance for me. Words have killed images or are concealing them. A civilization of words is a civilization distraught. Words create confusion. Words are not the word [les mots ne sont pas la parole].… The fact is that words say nothing, if I may put it that way There are no words for the deep est experience. The more I try to explain myself, the less I understand myself. Of course, not everything is unsayable in words, only the living truth.
These two last sentences echo, almost exactly, Hofmannsthal’s Kari Bühl. The writer, who is by definition master and servant of language, states that the living truth is no longer sayable. The theater of Beckett is haunted by this insight. Developing Chekhov’s notion of the near-impossibility of effective verbal interchange, it strains toward silence, toward an Act Without Words. Soon there will be plays in which absolutely nothing is said, in which each personage will struggle to achieve the outrage or futility of speech only to have the sound turn to gibberish or die in their grimacing mouths. The first articulate word spoken will bring down the curtain.
Under the influence, perhaps, of Heidegger and of Heidegger’s gloss on Hölderlin, recent French linguistic philosophy also assigns a special function and prestigious authority to silence. For Brice Parain, “language is the threshold of silence.” Henri Lefebvre finds that silence “is at once inside language, and on its near and far sides.” Much of his theory of speech depends on the organized patterns of silence in the otherwise continuous and consequently indecipherable linguistic code. Silence has “another speech than ordinary saying” (un autre Dire que le dire ordinaire), but it is meaningful speech nevertheless.
These are not macabre fantasies or paradoxes for logicians. The question of whether the poet should speak or be silent, of whether language is in a condition to accord with his needs, is a real one. “No poetry after Auschwitz,” said Adorno, and Sylvia Plath enacted the underlying meaning of his statement in a manner both histrionic and profoundly sincere. Has our civilization, by virtue of the inhumanity it has carried out and condoned—we are accomplices to that which leaves us indifferent—forfeited its claims to that indispensable luxury which we call literature? Not for ever, not everywhere, but simply in this time and place, as a city besieged forfeits its claims to the freedom of the winds and the cool of evening outside its walls.
I am not saying that writers should stop writing. This would be fatuous. I am asking whether they are not writing too much, whether the deluge of print in which we seek our deafened way is not itself a subversion of meaning. “A civilization of words is a civilization distraught.” It is one in which the constant inflation of verbal counters has so devalued the once numinous act of written communication that there is almost no way for the valid and the genuinely new to make themselves heard. Each month must produce its masterpiece and so the press hounds mediocrity into momentary, fake splendor. The scientists tell us that the acceleration of specialized, monographic publication is such that libraries will soon have to be placed in orbit, circling the earth and subject to electronic scanning as needed. The proliferation of verbiage in humanistic scholarship, the trivia decked out as erudition or critical re-assessment, threatens to obliterate the work of art itself and the exacting freshness of personal encounter on which true criticism depends. We also speak far too much, far too easily, making common what was private, arresting into the clichés of false certitude that which was provisional, personal, and therefore alive on the shadow-side of speech. We live in a culture which is, increasingly, a wind-tunnel of gossip; gossip that reaches from theology and politics to an unprecedented noising of private concerns (the psychoanalytic process is the high rhetoric of gossip). This world will end neither with a bang nor a whimper, but with a headline, a slogan, a pulp novel larger than the cedars of Lebanon. In how much of what is now pouring forth do words become word—and where is the silence needed if we are to hear that metamorphosis?
The second point is one of politics, in the fundamental sense. It is better for the poet to mutilate his own tongue than to dignify the inhuman either with his gift or his uncaring. If totalitarian rule is so effective as to break all chances of denunciation, of satire, then let the poet cease—and let the scholar cease from editing the classics a few miles down the road from the death camp. Precisely because it is the signature of his humanity, because it is that which makes of man a being of striving unrest, the word should have no natural life, no neutral sanctuary, in the places and season of bestiality. Silence is an alternative. When the words in the city are full of savagery and lies, nothing speaks louder than the unwritten poem.
“Now the Sirens have a still more fatal weapon than their song,” wrote Kafka in his Parables, “namely their silence. And though admittedly such a thing has never happened, still it is conceivable that someone might possibly have escaped from their singing; but from their silence certainly never.”
How silent must that sea have been; how ready for the wonder of the word.