Modernism and Language Scepticism
Shane Weller
The history of the West has been marked by a recurrent sense that, in the face of certain thoughts, feelings, objects or experiences, words fail us. For Plato, the Ideas that constitute the real (of which human beings can capture only the shadows on the cave wall) may be described, but they remain in a more profound sense beyond the grasp of language. Similarly, the long tradition of negative theology – which insists that God can be expressed linguistically only in terms of what he is not, any positive articulation of his essence being at best a reduction, if not a distortion, of that essence – bears witness to a profound sense of the limited power of language. And yet, while the notion of the ineffable has been an abiding one in Western culture, the modern age has been distinguished in no small measure by a far more radical sense that language as such cannot capture reality, that there is an unbridgeable divide between word and world, and that, far from being a means to articulate both the inner and the outer realms, language is in fact precisely that which prevents such an articulation. According to George Steiner, for instance, modernity – which he sees as commencing in the 1870s – is the time of the ‘after-Word’, an epoch defined principally by the breaking of the contract between language and reality upon which Western culture was established (see Steiner, 1989, 93; cf. Noble, 1978). Alongside the widely held belief that language shapes rather than simply reflects or represents our world, the modern period is also marked by the conviction that the only hope of making contact with reality, be that reality objective or subjective, lies in a vigilant distrust of language, a distrust that can lead either to an attempted renewal of the word or to a commitment to its destruction.
Evidence to support the claim that a new and far more thoroughgoing scepticism towards language arises in Europe in the second half of the nineteenth century is to be found in both the literary and the philosophical discourses of the period. The realist aesthetic underpinning the works of the great nineteenth-century European novelists from Balzac to Tolstoy assumes, for the most part, that the inner world of consciousness, as well as the natural and cultural realms within which that consciousness is located, can be articulated in a shared language, even if there is also an increasing sense of the historicity of languages and the importance of dialectal variations. In short, for nineteenth-century realism the language of literature tends to be a refined or polished version of everyday language. Along with this there prevails a consensual relation between writer and reader, for both of whom language has an unproblematic referential function.
With the emergence of the Symbolist movement in France in the late nineteenth century, however, this easy confidence in what Stéphane Mallarmé describes in the poem ‘The Tomb of Edgar Poe’ (1876) as the ‘words of the tribe’ (mots de la tribu) (Mallarmé, 1982, 51) is placed in question. A decade later, in ‘Crisis of Verse’ (1886), Mallarmé declares that all languages are ‘imperfect insofar as they are many; the absolute one is lacking […]; the diversity, on earth, of idioms prevents anyone from proffering words that would otherwise be, when made uniquely, the material truth’ (2007, 205). Mallarmé then goes on to anticipate the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure’s notion of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign – that is, the non-natural, non-mimetic relation between signifier and signified, or, in Mallarmé’s case, between word and thing – by asserting that ‘discourse fails to express objects by touches corresponding to them in shading or bearing […]. Beside ombre [shade], which is opaque, ténèbres [shadows] is not very dark; what a disappointment, in front of the perversity that makes jour [day] and nuit [night], contradictorily, sound dark in the former and light in the latter’ (205).
Crucially, however, Mallarmé claims that poetry ‘makes up for language’s deficiencies’, it being a form of language that is ‘essential’, in contrast to the ‘brute and immediate’ language of everyday use. Poetry, for Mallarmé, is ‘essential’ language precisely because it overcomes the arbitrariness of the relation between word and world, the result being that in the poem ‘the object named is bathed in a brand new atmosphere’ (Mallarmé, 2007, 211). For Mallarmé, then, as subsequently for T. S. Eliot and many of the other high modernists, not least Ezra Pound, Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, Rainer Maria Rilke and Osip Mandelstam, the writer’s task is precisely to ‘purify the dialect of the tribe’ (Eliot, 1969, 194), to renew language in a manner that goes far beyond the refining aims of the realist. In his radical spatialization of language in the poem ‘A Throw of the Dice’ (1897), Mallarmé sets the standard for the modernist revolution of the word, a revolution predicated on the sense that everyday language lacks the power to communicate or even to gesture effectively towards the real, which is itself reconceived by many writers as something deeply subjective and thus multiple. The reader of ‘A Throw of the Dice’ is faced with a language that has been spatialized and syntactically fragmented, and in which the materiality of the word is emphasized through dramatic typographical variations. Mallarmé’s preferred image for this ‘tampering’ with verse is the constellation.
Like most neat distinctions within the field of literary history and aesthetics, the one between realist and Symbolist aesthetic tends to lose something of its purchase upon closer scrutiny. Three decades before Mallarmé’s claims concerning the deficiency of all languages, his compatriot Gustave Flaubert is to be found in Madame Bovary (1857) questioning the power of the word. Flaubert has Emma’s lover, Rodolphe, compare ‘human language’ (la parole humaine) to a ‘cracked kettledrum on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, when what we long to do is make music that will move the stars to pity’ (Flaubert, 2004, 170). According to Roland Barthes, it is precisely with Flaubert that literature’s entire concern becomes the ‘problematics of language’ (Barthes, 1967, 9). It would be fair to say, however, that Mallarmé’s operations on language in ‘A Throw of the Dice’ and his late sonnets are considerably more radical than Flaubert’s in later novels such as Salammbô (1862) and Bouvard and Pécuchet (1881). In Mallarmé’s poems of the 1890s, any simple correspondence between word and world disappears; in these works, language operates not so much referentially as in a manner akin to music, by way of evocation rather than description. This move away from the semantic to the affective takes up Schopenhauer’s privileging of music above literature as the ‘most powerful of the arts’ (see Schopenhauer, 1966, 2: 448).
Barthes tells only part of the story, then, when he claims that Mallarmé’s aim is the ‘destruction of language, with Literature reduced, so to speak, to being its carcass’ (Barthes, 1967, 11). For it is possible to see the Symbolist poetic rather differently, relating it back to Kant’s conception of poetry in The Critique of Judgement (1790), where the German philosopher argues that poetry is the highest of the arts precisely because it offers us forms that accord with concepts in a manner that ‘couples with the presentation of the concept a wealth of thought to which no verbal expression is completely adequate’ (Kant, 1952, 190). Poetry for Kant, then, necessarily reminds us of the limits of language, but it does so in a manner that evokes that which remains unnamable. The limits of language would thus be both the precondition for and the justification of poetry.
If Mallarmé’s intervention in the literary field can be read in at least two ways, so can the classic literary expression of the broken contract between word and world in Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ‘Ein Brief’ (1902), generally known in the English-speaking world as the ‘Lord Chandos Letter’. This fictional missive from Lord Chandos to the philosopher Francis Bacon, a founding figure of the empirical natural sciences, records the former’s sudden and devastating experience of the world as resistant to conceptualization – and thus to adequate linguistic articulation:
Everything fell into pieces in front of me, the pieces into more pieces, and nothing could be contained in a single concept any more. Individual words swam around me: they melted into eyes, which stared at me, and which I had to stare back at: they are like whirlpools, it gives me vertigo to look down at them, they turn without cease, and transport you into nothingness. (Hofmannsthal, 1995, 11)
For Lord Chandos, then, the referential function of language has been lost. Language has become a screen or veil, wholly inadequate to map the real. This experience is essentially that of radical nominalism. When the habitual mode of apprehending the world breaks down, there emerge radical singularities that cannot, without distortion, be grasped by conceptual thinking – and thus cannot be captured by language. From such a nominalist perspective, to use the word ‘tree’ is simply a nonsense, since it captures nothing of trees in their diversity and mutability. All words suffer this fate. In the story ‘Funes, the Memorious’ (1942), Jorge Luis Borges’s narrator claims that ‘To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract’ (Borges, 1993, 90). Similarly, the language crisis of Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos is owing to his realization that to use language is to forget differences and, in so doing, to fail to grasp reality.
In philosophical discourse, a similar argument lies at the heart of a work published at the same time and in the same country (Austria): Fritz Mauthner’s three-volume Beiträge zu einer Kritik der Sprache (Contributions to a Critique of Language, 1901–3). According to Mauthner, the entire history of Western philosophy has been afflicted by what he terms ‘word superstition’ or ‘word fetishism’, that is, the mistaking of the word for the reality. That said, Mauthner identifies a series of valiant attempts to achieve a philosophical critique of language. In medieval nominalism, one finds ‘the first attempt at the real self-decomposition of metaphorical thinking’. If this attempt failed, it was because the nominalists could not free themselves from that ‘supreme metaphor’, God (Mauthner, 1923, 2: 474). In Mauthner’s history of language critique, the next important step was taken by Kant, in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), with its insistence that we can have no knowledge of the ‘noumenal’, or things in themselves (2: 476). Like the nominalists before him, however, Kant fails to carry his wholly justified ‘negative thinking’ through to its necessary conclusion, instead settling upon a new supreme metaphor: ‘pure reason’ (2: 477). While with Hegel, the ‘old word superstition indulges in the wildest orgies’ (2: 478), with Schopenhauer philosophy once again ‘shakes often and strongly at the gates of the critique of language’, only to lapse back into word superstition through the privileging of the concept of will (2: 478). As for Nietzsche, he remains, for all his critical energy, a victim of ‘word fetishism’, too enamoured by the power of his own rhetoric to achieve a genuine critique of language.
In his dismissal of Nietzsche, Mauthner makes no mention of the former’s essay ‘On Truth and Lying in a Non-Moral Sense’, written in 1873, but only published posthumously. There, Nietzsche anticipates Mauthner’s critique of metaphorical thinking by famously claiming that truth itself is nothing but a ‘mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms’ (Nietzsche, 1999, 146). Just as Mauthner summarily dismisses Nietzsche, so he in his turn would be dismissed by Wittgenstein, who, in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921), endorses his fellow Austrian’s view that philosophy should be a ‘critique of language’, only to qualify this with the phrase ‘but not at all in Mauthner’s sense’ (Wittgenstein, 1981, 63). Mauthner champions the ‘Nichtwort’, or ‘not-word’ (Mauthner, 1923, 1: 83), as the ultimate means to overcome ‘word superstition’. This ‘not-word’ is something other than silence, however, the latter being ‘still a word’, according to Mauthner. In contrast, the ‘not-word’ is a form of self-negating word, a form of language use that does away with itself as language. While being no less suspicious of language, Wittgenstein takes a different approach in his Tractatus, where he argues both that ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’ (Wittgenstein, 1981, 149) and that ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’ (189). For the philosopher, the only things that can be said are the ‘propositions of natural science. i.e. something that has nothing to do with philosophy’. That which lies beyond language – as the ‘inexpressible’ (Unaussprechliches) – is the ‘mystical’, and this, Wittgenstein argues, ‘shows itself’ (187).
In proposing the ‘Nichtwort’ as the means to free thinking from word superstition, Mauthner might seem to chime with Hofmannsthal’s Lord Chandos, who informs his addressee that he is to abandon writing altogether, since linguistic expression will always miss the real. That this abandonment of the literary should be articulated with such rhetorical power is more than a mere paradox: it bespeaks a valorization of literature akin to both Kant’s and Mallarmé’s championing of poetry, as that form of language (‘essential’ rather than ‘brute and immediate’) which alone can chart the limits of language. Mauthner’s Beiträge contains a similar valorization of the literary, for he identifies a particular literary style as the means to break free of word superstition, namely an ironic use of language in the manner of Goethe’s Poetry and Truth (1808–31). In this autobiographical work, Mauthner argues, Goethe ‘really appears, more than any other writer before or after him, to rise above all possible limits of language, because he uses words to a certain extent ironically, in an inimitable way, that is to say with the clearly betrayed complaint that he must simply follow linguistic usage’ (Mauthner, 1923, 2: 506). Goethe displays a ‘superior manner of using words as mere words’ (2: 507), and, in so doing, reminds the reader at every step of the gap between word and world. Mauthner’s championing of Goethe is telling, since it reveals his (decidedly modernist) belief that a certain form of literary practice is capable of implementing a critique of language that remains unachieved in the history of philosophy.
Before we reflect on the consequences of these forms of late nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century language scepticism for the high modernism of the 1920s, it is important to consider what the reasons might have been for the emergence of such language scepticism at that particular historical moment. George Steiner is arguably right to claim that in part this loss of faith in the power of the word is owing to the rise of the sciences – physics, biology, chemistry – and the shift to non-linguistic ways of representing the world (see Steiner, 1967). As a result, a sense began to emerge that words are not the most effective means by which to comprehend the world. Mallarmé renders language pictorial as well as musical. Rhythm and image become as important as semantic charge. His emphasis upon ‘Number’ in ‘A Throw of the Dice’ might be read as reflecting an awareness of this shift away from language as the primary means of articulating reality.
In addition, one may point to a political transformation: the erosion of the sense of the bourgeoisie as a progressive class. Increasingly, artists came to see themselves as set in opposition to the very class to which so many of them belonged. In Mallarmé’s idea of the ‘words of the tribe’, later taken up by T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets, one can certainly detect a class element. With the rise of mass culture, this sense of difference – and of artistic distinction – was only exacerbated. For an example, one need only look to the violently satirical reaction of the Austrian writer Karl Kraus to what he saw as, in Steiner’s words, ‘the lexical and grammatical decay of literary, journalistic, political, legal discourse’ (Steiner, 1989, 112). In Kraus, the critique of language is, then, not so much philosophical as political. It is a form of ideology critique. More generally, the ever-increasing commodification to which Marx and his followers draw attention may be seen to extend to language itself, with the result being that writers (along with some philosophers, especially Martin Heidegger) came to see their task as the creation of a new, revivified language. Heidegger’s neologistic philosophical lexicon is distinctly modernist precisely in its Mallarméan commitment to a language beyond the ‘brute’ language of the everyday.
This new sense of the writer’s task forms part of the more general ‘linguistic turn’ in the twentieth century, in which language itself becomes the model or metaphor by which all experience is to be grasped (see, for example, Bell, 1999, 18). Rather than reflecting reality, language came to be seen as shaping or even producing it. In his posthumously published Course in General Linguistics (1916), Saussure describes language and thought (or signifier and signified) as being like two sides of a sheet of paper; to cut into one side is necessarily to cut into the other. The possibility of thought without or beyond language is simply dismissed. Another highly influential version of the argument that language has a shaping rather than a reflecting or descriptive role is to be found in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, in the claim that the ‘The limits of my language mean the limits of my world’. If my language is, in Mallarmé’s words, ‘brute’, then so too will be my experience of the world. Upon the renewal of language would therefore depend the renewal of the world. Far from being a merely aesthetic affair, the modernist revolution of the word is nothing less than an attempt to change the world.
As a reaction to language scepticism, this attempted renewal came in various forms. That the Enlightenment project, embodied in the bourgeoisie, should have led not, as anticipated, to universal peace but to world war and millions of deaths more than justified the reaction against this project, and against the class that was supposed to carry it through to completion. This insight drives the most radical of the avant-garde movements: Dada. In the art of Dadaists such as Hugo Ball and Raoul Hausmann, language is subjected to the most extreme violence (see, for instance, Schaffner, 2007, 63–87). Words are dissected, and the shared language of Mallarmé’s ‘tribe’ is replaced by sound-words with no clearly identifiable shared meaning. Hugo Ball’s sound poem ‘Karawane’ (1917), for instance, begins: ‘jolifanto bambla ô falli bambla/grossiga m’pfa habla horem’ (qtd. in Schaffner, 2007, 73). Conventional language is replaced by new and unique ‘words’ that are highly suggestive, but in a manner that will differ from reader to reader. The sheer materiality of language is also emphasized, not least through varying typefaces and font sizes. No longer is language conceived as a window onto the world. Rather, the word itself takes on the materiality of the world. To read becomes an immersion in this linguistic material. This emphasis upon the radical materiality of the word is part of a highly politicized language scepticism: for Dadaists such as Ball and Hausmann, language was ideologically soiled. Rather than some imaginary purification (in the manner of a Mallarmé), the Dadaists sought to exhibit the necessarily ideological nature of all languages, not least poetic language.
In the modernist poetry that takes its inspiration from Rimbaud and Mallarmé, Roland Barthes detects the destruction of the ‘spontaneously functional nature of language’ (Barthes, 1967, 52). Words become more like things, and as a result their instrumental (referential) function is impeded or even negated. Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons (1914) is an example of just such a frustration of the referential function. Discourse is concretized, atomized, even reified. It is in this kind of literary response to turn-of-the-century language scepticism that the Russian Formalists such as Victor Shklovsky and Roman Jakobson find what they take to be the defining characteristic of the literary, namely a defamiliarizing thickening of language. The word is no longer conceived as a medium; rather, it is a form of embodiment or enactment. Herein can be seen an ambiguity at the heart of the modernist revolution of the word in response to turn-of-the-century language scepticism. On the one hand, language has to be at one with its object; the distance between word and world is to be collapsed. On the other hand, language is impeding or interruptive; as word enacts world, so the word comes to replace world. It is but the shortest of steps from Mauthner’s call for the ‘not-word’ (Nichtwort) to the claim that there is nothing but language – in short, that reality as such is essentially discursive.
In the wake of the Dada revolution of the word, Surrealism’s commitment to automatic writing in the 1920s constitutes another response to language scepticism that is very much in line with Mallarmé’s call for an ‘essential’ language in contradistinction to the ‘brute’ language of everyday life. The language of conscious construction is to be abandoned in favour of a language shaped by the unconscious. Freud’s preoccupation with parapraxes, and with metonymic displacements and metaphorical condensations, lies behind the modernist commitment to ambiguity and polyvalency. This move is part of a more general trend in modernism to produce a language that, as Louis Sass argues, resembles the discourse of the schizophrenic (see Sass, 1992).
Just as the Dadaists engaged in acts of violence against language, breaking up words and creating entirely new ones, on the grounds that existing languages had become so ideologically tainted that the most radical form of intervention was called for, even at the risk of destroying language altogether, so the highest of the high modernists, James Joyce, would undertake what Eugene Jolas was the first to describe as a language ‘revolution’ (Jolas, 1962; cf. Leavis, 1982, MacCabe, 1978). According to Jolas, ‘Modern life with its changed mythos and transmuted concepts of beauty makes it imperative that words be given new compositions and relationships’ (Jolas, 1962, 80). He identifies various attempts made to achieve this by the German Expressionists and the Surrealists, as well as by Gertrude Stein, before turning to Joyce, in whose ‘Work in Progress’ (later Finnegans Wake (1939)) language is ‘born anew before our eyes’. For Jolas, this rebirth is achieved through giving words ‘odors and sounds that conventional language does not know’ (Jolas, 1962, 89). In short, language is rendered material, sensuous. Samuel Beckett makes a similar point in his 1929 essay on Joyce’s ‘Work in Progress’: ‘Here is the savage economy of hieroglyphics. Here words are not the polite contortions of 20th century printer’s ink. They are alive’ (Beckett, 1962, 15–16).
Joyce’s commitment to a sensuous language that can overcome the shortcomings of everyday language by wedding signifier and signified is in line with the Mallarméan commitment to an ‘essential’ language that operates at a level below the semantic. As Julia Kristeva argues, through the importance that it gives to rhythm and sound, to echolalias, this modernist strand (which she sees as commencing with Lautréamont and Mallarmé) prioritizes the ‘semiotic’ over the symbolic function of language (see Kristeva, 1984). This commitment to the semiotic lies at the heart of the modernist attempt to achieve linguistic renewal in the face of a loss of faith in ‘everyday’ language and stands as a heroic alternative to Rimbaud’s retreat into poetic silence.
While driven, then, by a sense that language was failing – in the 1930s, while working on what would become Finnegans Wake, he took an interest in Mauthner’s work – Joyce sought to renew it. In Ulysses (1922), this renewal entails the adoption of a range of styles and registers, each selected for its appropriateness to a particular scene. In the ‘Oxen of the Sun’ episode, Joyce maps the history of literary styles onto the growth of a foetus. On the one hand, this suggests that language is natural and that it ‘grows’ in a manner akin to the growth of the organic. On the other hand – and here a language-sceptical note is sounded – there is a parodic dimension to Joyce’s procedure, recalling that of Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet. The shifting from one style to another inevitably suggests the arbitrary nature of all styles. There is no ‘natural’ or ‘pure’ language – no reine Sprache of the kind evoked by Walter Benjamin in his landmark essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923). If Ulysses reminds the reader ever more forcefully of linguistic and stylistic diversity, in Finnegans Wake Joyce responds differently to language scepticism, seeking to generate a new (sound) language out of a wide range of historical languages, with the underlying (unifying) principle being punning. Rather than a range of styles, words in Finnegans Wake signify in multiple directions simultaneously. This novel’s difficulty is the result of this synchronic multiplicity. The sound of the ‘fall’ of ‘a once wallstrait oldparr’ that lies at the origin of the story ‘retaled’ in Finnegans Wake can be articulated, but only in a word that appears in no single dictionary, a 100-letter word unlike any other:
bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk! (Joyce, 2000, 3)
Alongside Joyce, the other high modernist to exhibit the most radical linguistic operation in response to language scepticism is Ezra Pound, whose Cantos (1917–69) draws from numerous languages (not only Western), although without blending these together in the manner of Joyce. In the Cantos, fragmentation tends to prevail, along with juxtaposition, although the spatialization remains far less adventurous than Mallarmé’s in ‘A Throw of the Dice’.
Other high modernists were considerably less extreme than Joyce and Pound in their attempts to find a new language, although the sense that the writer could not simply accept everyday language lay at the heart of their work, too. On the one hand, Proust’s In Search of Lost Time (1913–27) is characterized not only by a convoluted syntax designed to capture the very movement of time as Bergsonian duration (durée), with its accretions and modifications, but also by a metaphoricity that never allows the reader to forget that the relation between mind and word is a highly mediated one. Samuel Beckett picks up on this when he asserts (in 1931) that ‘The rhetorical equivalent of the Proustian real is the chain-figure of the metaphor’ and that Proust’s style is characterized by ‘the crest and break of metaphor after metaphor’ (Beckett, 1987, 88). The description of memory at the end of the first part of ‘Combray’, in Swann’s Way (1913), is among the most celebrated of such metaphors, arising as it does out of a syntax of breath-defying sinuosity:
And as in the game wherein the Japanese amuse themselves by filling a porcelain bowl with water and steeping in it little pieces of paper which until then are without character or form, but, the moment they become wet, stretch and twist and take on colour and distinctive shape, become flowers or houses or people, solid and recognisable, so in that moment all the flowers in our garden and in M. Swann’s park, and the water-lilies on the Vivonne and the good folk of the village and their little dwellings and the parish church and the whole of Combray and its surroundings, taking shape and solidity, sprang into being, town and gardens alike, from my cup of tea. (Proust, 1992, 54–5)
On the other hand, in Death on Credit (1936), Louis-Ferdinand Céline adopts extreme parataxis, in stark counterpoint to Proustian hypotaxis. Céline’s novel begins: ‘Here we are, alone again. It’s all so slow, so heavy, so sad … I’ll be old soon. Then at last it will be over. So many people have come into my room. They’ve gone away. They’ve grown old, wretched, sluggish, each in some corner of the world’ (Céline, 1989, 15). This atomized syntax becomes the form for a demotic language that exposes T. S. Eliot’s attempts at the demotic in Part II of The Waste Land (1922) as little more than caricature.
The various – often very different – linguistic audacities of the high modernists are undertaken with the aim of finding a language in which the articulated meaning is incarnate in the materiality of the text. This pursuit of incarnated or enacted meaning arguably reaches its most extreme form in Finnegans Wake, characterized as that work is by a new and unique language, in which, as Beckett observed as early as 1929, the writing is ‘not about something; it is that something itself’ (Beckett, 1962, 14). The radicality of Joyce’s ‘revolution of language’ can be understood only in the context of a no less radical language scepticism, against which it constitutes the most extreme reaction. Finnegans Wake, then, constitutes the ne plus ultra of the modernist reaction against language scepticism. That it should have been published in the year that the Second World War broke out is telling. No less telling is that another major work of high modernism, Hermann Broch’s The Death of Virgil, should have been published in 1945, when Europe was in ruins, and that it should end with a gesture towards that which lies ‘beyond language’ (jenseits der Sprache) (Broch, 1995, 454), returning the reader to the very language scepticism against which high modernism sought so strenuously to define itself.
The failure of the high modernist attempt to achieve lasting cultural renewal through linguistic/aesthetic renewal became increasingly evident in the course of the 1930s, with the coming to power of the Nazis in Germany, Franco’s defeat of the republican forces in Spain and Stalin’s ‘show trials’ in the Soviet Union. With the outbreak of the Second World War, all hope of European regeneration in the wake of the First World War seemed to many to have been extinguished. The implications for the modernist engagement with language were considerable. It is no coincidence that one of the principal champions of Finnegans Wake, Samuel Beckett, should emerge as a major figure in late modernism, in which one finds a new response to the wave of language scepticism in the late nineteenth century. If late modernism may be distinguished from high modernism, then it is not least in the former’s retreat from the word, a retreat that takes the form not of silence but of linguistic negativism, or what might, following Beckett, be described as ‘unwording’. In a letter written in July 1937, Beckett set out the principles for a new kind of writing, a literature of the ‘unword’ or ‘non-word’ (Unwort) as opposed to what he describes as Joyce’s ‘apotheosis of the word’ (Beckett, 2009a, 519). The first step towards the achievement of such a literature of the unword lay, according to Beckett, in a breaking down of the materiality of language, that very materiality which is so characteristic of high modernist literature. For the Beckett of 1937, language is a ‘veil’ or carapace, something to be rent asunder or bored into, in order to reach the reality behind it, a reality that, according to Beckett, may well be a ‘nothingness’ (Beckett, 2009a, 518). That it might be impossible to achieve such a rending of the language veil is suggested in Watt, the novel that Beckett wrote shortly after his reading of Mauthner and which he completed in 1945. As he puts it in that work: ‘what we know partakes in no small measure of the nature of what has so happily been called the unutterable or ineffable, so that any attempt to utter or eff it is doomed to fail, doomed, doomed to fail’ (Beckett, 2009b, 52–3).
That both Joyce and Beckett should have taken considerable interest in Mauthner’s Beiträge in the 1930s, and that this interest should have led on the one hand to Finnegans Wake and on the other to The Unnamable (1953), reveals the two, very different ways in which language scepticism impacted on modernism. Unlike Joyce, Beckett took to heart the philosopher’s idea of the ‘not-word’ and sought in his post–Second World War works to achieve a highly paradoxical writing of this ‘not-word’. In the 1949 Three Dialogues, with Georges Duthuit, Beckett presents art’s underlying principle as ‘The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express’ (Beckett, 1987, 103). In The Unnamable, he explores from the inside the impossible situation created by such a guiding principle: a speaker seeking to describe where, who and when he is, and, in Mauthnerian fashion, rejecting each and every self-identification as nothing but a metaphor. Beckett’s narrator is trapped in words; seeking to go beyond words in order to grasp the reality of who, where and when he is, he finds himself obliged to rely on language. The paradox that is latent in Hofmannsthal’s ‘Lord Chandos Letter’ – with its astonishingly eloquent condemnation of language – becomes in late modernism a cause for tortured linguistic negativism. Writing to undo language in order to reach that what lies beyond it, Beckett found himself committed to the impossible. This impossibility is reflected in the aporetic nature of The Unnamable, the narrator of which vacillates between antithetical positions on his nature with regard to language. On the one hand, he is nothing but words; on the other, something else entirely, something that no word can capture:
I’m in words, made of words, others’ words […] I’m all these words, all these strangers, this dust of words, with no ground for their settling, no sky for their dispersal, coming together to say, fleeing one another to say, that I am they, all of them, those that merge, those that part, those that never meet, and nothing else, yes, something else, that I’m something quite different, a quite different thing, a wordless thing in an empty place (Beckett, 2010, 104)
That there is a distinctly new form of engagement with language scepticism in late modernism is suggested by the remarkable similarity between Beckett’s articulation of the artist’s predicament in the Three Dialogues and that of the French writer Maurice Blanchot in his first collection of critical essays, Faux Pas (1943). For Blanchot, ‘The writer finds himself in the increasingly ludicrous condition of having nothing to write, of having no means with which to write it, and of being constrained by the utter necessity of always writing it’ (Blanchot, 2001, 3). No less than Beckett’s Unnamable, so Blanchot’s first novel, Thomas the Obscure (1941), is characterized by unremitting linguistic negativism, with negative modifiers such as ‘inexpressible’, ‘unsayable’, ‘indefinable’, ‘untransmissible’ and ‘ineffable’ serving again and again to mark the limits of language.
Other post-war writers whose work may be seen as late modernist on account of such linguistic negativism include the poets Paul Celan and Geoffrey Hill. The shadow cast over language for each of these writers is the ‘unspeakable’ nature of the Holocaust. In an essay published in 1951, Theodor Adorno famously claimed that ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ (Adorno, 1981, 34). He later found himself compelled to modify this assertion, in no small part on account of his reading of Beckett and Celan. What remains clear, however, is that the post-Holocaust world is one in which language scepticism takes on a far darker hue. In the poem ‘Tübingen, January’, from his 1963 volume The Rose of No One, for instance, Celan evokes Friedrich Hölderlin, whose own work from the period shortly before the darkening of his mind in 1804–5 anticipates (as both Benjamin and Adorno were among the first to note) the paratactic, fragmentary, dislocated language of late modernism. In Celan’s poem, the only language that can begin to articulate post-Holocaust reality is a stammering, fragmented, repetitive language that is scarcely language at all: ‘Should,/should a man,/should a man come into the world, today, with/the shining beard of the/patriarchs: he could,/if he spoke of this/time, he/could/only babble and babble/over, over/againagain.//(“Pallaksh. Pallaksh.”)’ (Celan, 1988, 177).
The language revolution that is so characteristic of the European avant-garde (especially Expressionism and Dada) and of certain strands of high modernism (especially the later work of Joyce and Pound) stands in dialectical counterpoint to language scepticism, a response to this scepticism guided by the Mallarméan conviction that a radical renewal of language is both necessary and possible. Late modernism, in contrast, revisits turn-of-the-century language scepticism, haunted by a historically informed sense that it is not the renewal of the word that is required, but rather its negation, an insistence upon that which exceeds expression, that which is unspeakable in both senses of the word. Late modernists such as Beckett, Blanchot and Celan develop forms of linguistic negativism as what they take to be the only aesthetically and ethically justifiable response to a modernity perceived as catastrophic.
While remaining committed to the high modernist ideal that art must take its critical distance from modernity, the work of the late modernists is characterized by a far more pessimistic view of the power of art to transform society, and of the power of language to communicate either the experience of modernity or the possibility of any alternative to it. High modernism tends to turn to myth in order to make sense of, and to bestow order and coherence upon, what T. S. Eliot famously describes (in his 1923 essay on Joyce’s Ulysses) as ‘the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history’ (Eliot, 1975, 177). In contrast, late modernism, with its painful awareness of the political uses to which myth was put by the totalitarian regimes of the 1930s and 1940s, has no such faith in any clear alternative to instrumental reason. Instead, late modernism finds itself obliged to take refuge in the negative. In this, it is forcefully anticipated by certain language-sceptical tendencies in high modernism. In The Counterfeiters (1925), for instance, André Gide includes a violent attack not just on literature as the most disgusting of all ‘nauseating human emanations’ but also on ‘those promissory notes which go by the name of words’ (Gide, 1966, 291). More influential upon late modernist language scepticism is Franz Kafka, who in what are now generally known as the ‘Zürau Aphorisms’ (1917–18) declares that ‘To perform the negative is what is still required of us, the positive is already ours’ (Kafka, 1994, 8). Kafka’s own work forcefully anticipates late modernist language scepticism. As early as 1910, in a letter to Max Brod, he can be found declaring: ‘My whole body warns me against every word; every word, before it lets me write it down, first looks around in all directions. The sentences literally crumble before me; I see their insides and then have to stop quickly’ (Kafka, 1978, 70). This anxiety about language develops in Kafka’s later works into almost unremitting linguistic negativism. In his rewriting of the Greek myth of the sirens, Kafka asserts that their dangerous power lies not in their singing but in their silence. And in ‘Josephine the Singer, or the Mouse Folk’, a story about a singing mouse written in the last year of his life (1924), Kafka’s narrator first questions whether the sound produced by Josephine is singing at all, and not merely ‘piping’ (Kafka, 1993, 234), and then concludes his narrative by recording her eventual disappearance: ‘she will not sing’ (250). This story captures a retreat from the word that is powerfully proleptic of late modernist language scepticism.
In the late modernism of a Beckett or a Celan, the performance of the negative takes the form of an ‘unwording’ in which language is turned back against itself, not in order to achieve an ‘essential’ language of the kind sought by Mallarmé and the high modernists, a language purged of the ‘brute’, but rather with the highly paradoxical aim of achieving a ‘literature of the unword’ that might disclose an image of what Beckett in 1945 describes as ‘humanity in ruins’ (Beckett, 1995, 278). In late modernism, then, late nineteenth- and turn-of-the-century language scepticism feeds into a conception not just of language (and its limits), or even of literature (and its limits), but of the human and its limits, which by the second half of the 1940s were revealed to be such as scarcely anyone in 1900 could have begun to imagine. The language scepticism that characterizes late modernism is thus rooted in a profound scepticism about humanity as such.
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