Some Complex Functions of Language

[Original headnote:] George Whalley is Professor of English at Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario.  He is the author of numerous published articles and books including No Man and Island (1948), Poetic Process (1953), Coleridge and Sara Hutchinson (1955), The Legend of John Hornby (1963), and (ed.) A Place of Liberty (1964).  He has been involved in Coleridge studies since 1945 and recently completed Vol. I of a 5-volume edition of Coleridge’s Marginalia for the Collected Coleridge.

For nearly thirty years I have been trying to help students – undergraduates and graduates – to read literature, to find out how poems and other imaginative writings work, and so to find out how they themselves work.  The study of literature – that is, the study of anything excellently written – is of value as a way of securing our civilised heritage and our knowledge of man; certainly it allows us to enter into experience that would not otherwise be accessible to us, or if accessible not grasped with such clarity and force; but even more important, the study of literature is perhaps more the only way now left to us to engage sustained inquiry that genuinely allows us to examine ourselves, to encourage the growth of our individual mental and emotional capacities, to make ourselves real.  The “content” of literature, even of the most complicated and obscure kinds, can to a great extent be expected to look after itself, whether in any individual’s mind it falls into naive “interpretation” or into the most attenuated and intricate perversity.  In any case, interpreting literature tends always to be an “explaining away”; it will dissolve the very thing we are looking for unless we take resolute steps – by alternating analysis and synthesis – to ensure that that doesn’t happen.  But the reading, the way of grasping the living virtue of what is written and being guided by the peculiar identity of a piece of writing, is a far more difficult matter than interpretation.  Sensitiveness is clarified by the innocence that most of us have lost through sophistication; quiet submission and active intelligence meet in a momentary act of faith; the reader puts aside for the time being his own urgent desires, yearnings, and fears, and his insistent and blinding self-centredness in order to enter into a living thing-made which in its genesis had nothing to do with him and which he could not conceivably have made himself.  To achieve a correct passivity and initiative, to present to a piece of writing the whole learned and responsive capacity that the poem may require, refined, alert, and agile, is no mean accomplishment.  Since universal literacy (in one sense) has inevitably produced universal illiteracy (in another sense), there seem to me few accomplishments more worth encouraging – wherever possible and by whatever means – than a fine sense of language.  For a sense of language is no mere acquired accomplishment like flute-playing or skill in gymnastics, but a benign infection that can nourish us with intimations of our true nature and restore us, against the incursions of mechanism and manipulated power, to our birthright of sane humanity.

Therefore I always begin a study of literature with the most complex uses of language, to be sure that it is language we are dealing with and not some inert and marginal instance.  I am certain that there is no such thing as simple language, except as far as we can occasionally glimpse, through the inherent and indissoluble complexities of actual language, the translucent simplicity of the principles by which it articulates itself.  In the study of literature, and in the right-reading of literature, there is no aspect of language that can be safely ignored; nor is there any means of analysing language – from the most forthright descriptive schemata to the most tenuous recognition of intricate function – that does not need to be invoked at some time or other.

It is well known that practically everybody is intellectually lazy; that most of us will do anything to avoid thinking carefully about anything for more than a few microseconds; that as soon as anything presents itself to the mind we drift off into self-centred fantasy, or a defensive abstraction, or the aimless fussing with technicalities that often masquerades as a study of language.  When we try to sustain our thinking over a text we find ourselves taking an escape-route – talking about the poet rather than the poem, about the alleged “message” of the poem rather than what it is actually saying, about its place in the generic history of a given “form” as though given a general formula we need no longer try to read the given poem; talking about its “philosophy” or its sociological or historical or even linguistic implications rather than about what it actually is doing, gesturing forth, embodying, declaring.  This kind of intellectual-abstractive shiftiness, which is also a form of emotional laziness, is disreputable enough when the intention is to achieve a good reading; it is much more lamentable when, becoming habitual, it shuts us off from the refined and potent reality of language itself.

Retreat from existential engagement in language into abstraction, usually established as a reflex in the course of haphazard and ill-managed early schooling, is often reinforced and rationalised these days by two assumptions often treated as axioms of literary study.  (a) Any emotional response to a poem is merely the reader’s personal and accidental reaction to what he is reading or listening to; like an “opinion” any personal response is as “valid” as any other, and none of them tells us anything about the poem; and because personal responses are “subjective”, all personal responses are invalid.  (b) Language is “communication”, a simple device for “communicating” “meaning”; emotion has nothing to do with the “meaning” that is to be “communicated.”

For a start it helps to distinguish between “emotion” and “feeling”, to define “feelings” as charges of psychic energy; to say that a poem is self-organizing pattern of feelings, probably unique; that the pattern of feelings may sometimes be stable and consistent enough, and strongly enough self-centred, to represent an “emotion” or an “emotional state”, but that that is a condition that developed poetry evidently seeks to avoid.  I am satisfied that “feeling” is the basis of our recognising, discriminating, remembering, knowing, judging; and that feeling is the energetic principle that not only imparts forward movement to language when it is uttered, but that also generates and minutely controls the resonant bonding of elements in an utterance as well as the “vertical” construction of implications over single elements (in tension with the forward or “horizontal” impulse of the utterance).  Vividness, clarity, force, even “thought”, are all direct functions of feeling.  Because the basis of poetry – and of language altogether – is feeling (and not a conventional agreement about certain signs in a system of notation), poetry is directly accessible to anybody who is capable of feeling-response, and in its complex identity is accessible to anybody who is capable of complex and accurate feeling.

Even though I recognise the integral “semantic” nature of words and the radical elements out of which single words grow, I see the semantic character of language as a final mode of articulate definition rather than as the source of language.  I am not prepared to begin with the meanings of single words, but suggest rather that an utterance is the irreducible unit in meaningful language, and that every utterance is well regarded as an “I-speaking”.  To suppose that an utterance is the sum of the lexical “meanings” of the words in it is a damaging shortcut that has tempted many who were not simple-minded enough to know better.  No matter what the intrinsic semantic nature of words may be, it is a person – an I – that means.  To say what he means, and also to discover to himself what he means, a person uses words “meaningfully” – that is, he puts together words and phrases (all of which have some semantic character) in such a way that the utterance embodies, makes physical, declares, and discloses (not a prior abstraction called “his meaning”, but) what was to be said.  Utterance, as Coleridge quaintly suggested, is outerance.  In the uttering of it, what is to be said finds a body; for not only is the whole logically prior to the parts, but every part bears in itself intimations of the whole.  The more vigorous and individual the utterance the more clearly it may establish the identity of the person-meaning-what-he-says, the correspondingly the farther it moves away from mere lexical “meaning” and standard syntax.  When we read works of literature we hear, often enough, more than one person speaking or meaning, and more often than not it is not the author we hear.  In a real sense we hear not only the poet speaking, but also – and perhaps dominantly – the poem speaking; the poem has an identity that has a voice and can speak to us.  It is difficult to avoid thinking of the poet “having a meaning” and “conveying the meaning” in words; but it is well somehow to avoid that figure.  If we acknowledge that on the whole poetry exists to articulate what is impalpable and the inexpressible but not quite unutterable, and use the word “meaning” to include that possibility, the term becomes “meaningless”, an abstract fiction constructed as an element in a putative sequence of (? causally related) events that probably in fact never occur.  The Greek equivalent for “to mean” – “to have in mind” – makes us more aware of this phantom regression.  If the business of poetry were no more than to “convey” an identifiable “meaning”, poetry would not exist; for the law of economy would forbid the mounting of so intricate a means for such a straightforward end; and the untranslatableness of poetry endorses the veto.

The business of poetry is to find a body for a complex mental event.  A poet, being “wordy”, finds the body in the physique of language.  Since language has probably never been used before to say precisely what he needs to say, he has to invent the way of saying it.  Yet the poet’s prime concern is not to say something but – as the very word poet implies – to make something.  Paul Valéry put this well: “if anyone wonders ... what I ‘wanted to say’ in a certain poem, I reply that I did not want to say but wanted to make, and that it was the intention of making which wanted what I said.”  So the questions we find most illuminating to ask first of a poem are not “What does it mean?” or even “What does it say?” but rather “What is it?”, What is it doing?”.

If it were objected that I have been speaking about poetry rather than language, I should reply that, although what I have been describing in the field of literature does not occur always when language is used, these things do occur in language and cannot profitably be ignored.  I should reply further that poetry represents and preserves the prototype of language; that in poetry we find, in a manner so concentrated that we can scarcely overlook it, the radical of language as complex, figurative, metaphorical, prelogical, closely allied to the ways our minds actually work, shaped by feeling.  I am also convinced that all people inherit the capacity for language in that primitive mode; and that, even among the least cultivated and the most impregnably sophisticated, people tend to respond instantly to a radical use of language with a sense of recognition.

To be able to respond directly to language in the radical mode, however, is a gift that can be drilled out of us or eroded by neglect.  Centuries of exaltation of “intellect” and “reason” (both in a limited sense) have in the Western world tended to place great emphasis on language as a logically-bonded descriptive notation bearing semantic content.  This has certainly clarified and sharpened language, made it more precise and subtle, less ambiguous and more various than it was in earlier uses.  But it has also involved loss – a loss that poets-by-profession and the instinctive poetic nature of all of us resist vigorously, even flagrantly.  Technological obscurantism having become a virtual imperative in our lifetime threatens to destroy language as it has never been threatened before, by degrading language to the level of univocal technical jargon or a conventional code.  The destruction of language is to a great extent the destruction of the self, as the development of language is the development of the self.  But in this process, as in the process of language itself, the initiative of the self is paramount: newspeak is not murder but suicide – we don’t have to speak it unless we want to, or unless we allow ourselves to be persuaded.  Language is the foundation of civilisation, not merely because it allows us to “communicate”, nor because it raises monuments to civilisation that preserve and nourish the “feel” of civilisation, but because it discovers and constructs and secures the identity of the self, and civilisation is not much more than the reasonable clustering of selves to their mutual satisfaction as selves.

So I am affirming what I take to be the true nature of language seen in its full complexity in works of literature, capable of embracing all the psychic energies of man; as I hear it in vigorous speech around me; as I see it used – with wary collusiveness and with a certain swashbuckling confidence of being lucky – by writers when they write well (writing at its best being another way of speaking when there’s nobody around to listen).  I also want to point to the clear responsibility that, at this time, is held by all those who teach language or are influential in the use of language or in the formulation of theories out of systematic inquiry.  If, as many assert on inferential-historical grounds, language was man’s first step towards civilisation, language is now the main bulwark of humanity against the barbarism of formulated power, the conversion of individuals into things (economic units, productive resources), the peculiar death of the spirit that occurs when apathy supervenes upon whatever is instinctively inventive, individually constructive, self-constructive.  Traditionally poets were the ones to “purify the language of the tribe.  I suspect that the influence of poets – those people whose special gift is to make word-things – is now very limited.  Reinforcement can perhaps be drawn, a fifth column even, from those who use language well enough to be able to speak-for-keeps and let others hear what that sounds like.

Ever since the intrusion of beads and bells into the universities and much woolly and insolent talk about “student power”, I have noticed that one of the earmarks of the “committed” young is a habit of speaking indistinctly, an insistent but pretentious use of key-terms that they seem to associate with the eternal verities, and a heavy reliance upon cant-terms which permit dazzling equivocation under the guide of logic.  The nervous habit of interposing “like” and “yuh know” whenever linguistic invention flags is no doubt a convention of social significance, and probably the habit of tiresome reiteration and the refusal to engage in reasonable discourse comes straight out of some Maoist manual.  As an identifying mannerism all this is probably no more irksome (to the washed and uncommitted) than the cheerful jargon of fighter pilots, computer experts, and racing-car buffs.  But, although I am obvious exaggerating through generalisation, I am disturbed that so much of it is utterly humourless and enervating.  What I find much more disturbing is that this has become the standard speech of those who are trying, as perhaps no previous generation of young people has seriously tried before, to see things straight and to get things clear.

The young commonly defend their aimless precision of speech by saying that language (? like civilisation) has worn out and is obsolete, is eroded beyond serious use (? like the capitalist plot), and that therefore there is no point in trying to speak distinctly or with care because it is no longer possible for people to “communicate” (? as in the theatre of the absurd) and because of their “alienation”.  This standard defence seems to me a slack and comfortable fantasy, luxuriously self-deceiving – on much the same footing as the consoling notion that life was never in such jeopardy as now, or that the “information explosion” makes it useless to try to know anything because nobody can know everything, or that “alienation” is a new word and a new concept.  In the study of literature in a university it is possible to meet these assumptions methodically: to say that the alleged “breakdown” is not in language but in those who use language; that, however language is used elsewhere, in a university language can (and must) be used clearly and accurately, and that every effort will be made to help students discover to themselves what it is they are trying to say; and that there is no better way of finding out how language works than by studying literature – “monuments of its own magnificence” – and by grappling patiently and fearlessly with whatever intellectual and emotional issues arise from such a study.  I have found that the response (after a certain initial incredulity) is positive and enthusiastic; a new world – of self-discovery and self-affirmation, rather than of dreary “self-expression” – begins to open to them, as though they were recovering their birthright.  That such a procedure should be necessary with students who are carefully selected from the best applicants, and who can be assumed to come mostly from “a good background”, is a melancholy condemnation both of our educational methods and of the state of a society that purports (or presumes) to place a high priority on education and literacy.

The process by which the admirable desire for universal literacy has produced something very close to widespread illiteracy could probably be traced with some precision.  The “illiteracy” I speak of is not simply the failure to understand the meanings of words (though I hear plenty of that), but the inability to take seriously the way of speaking and to infer from that – as we all do pretty effectively in childhood – why what was said was said in the way it was said.  Quite plainly this is not semantic illiteracy but emotional illiteracy, a failure to allow language to penetrate the abstractive and cerebral level to the level of feeling, of physical perception, where the energetic functions of language have their source.  The process of “the decay of language in the West” is probably social rather than purely linguistic; but the linguistic changes are perhaps the most accurate indicators of the kind of social changes that have been afoot.  For language is not simply “a medium of communication”; it can also serve as the reverse.  An obfuscating use of language can sometimes be the way of preserving one’s integrity by not disclosing oneself; but more often it is used to conceal intention and to distract attention.  In the long-drawn-out process of attrition – inevitable though it may be – most grave is the loss of dialects, and the consequent loss of virtuosity in speech, the peculiar lyrical inventiveness that often occurs in the speech of people who neither read nor write – the loss too of virtuoso listening that can catch and delight in every nuance, flourish, and frisson of inventive speech; for good speech requires a good listener, and a good listener has as much an ear for the language as an appetite for the substance.  In place of such virtuosity the synthetic and unlocalised formulations of television “personalities” and the evasive patter of politics, commerce, academia, and the experts provide unlovely models for an art as various and potent as language.

The use of language is a supreme process of synthesis, providing – in the reciprocal tensions between feeling, thinking, and uttering – our main formative principle of mental coherence.  If we take as the radical for language a poem, a self-declarative utterance – even though that presumption seems contrary to the generalised evidence – we are not likely to be misled by a superficial, because allegedly “simple”, account of how or why language is used.  If our premiss is that what language is is most clearly and fully to be seen in poetry, we find located in poetry not only the virtues of the most highly developed language but also, and at the same time, the prototypal (or primordial) figure and functions of language.  Also if we begin at the extreme of complexity we avoid the crude framework of mechanical cause-and-effect; but then we have to be prepared to deal with worded mental events the outer functional boundaries of which cannot be determined.  Although this assumption is particularly apt in securing good-reading, it does not preclude any particular technique of inquiry into language itself; indeed it helps us to assess the relevance and scope of any proposed method of inquiry, to locate it in the whole field of language, and to adjust method to the particular matter and purpose of inquiry.

That poetry comes first in the development of language and descriptive discourse later as an abstractive refinement is well attested.  For the highly cultivated intelligences of Plato and Aristotle language was profoundly fascinating.  Both shaped language to the needs of sustained philosophical inquiry, and though Plato wrote like a poet and Aristotle more like an engineer both sensed that language had magical properties, that it could do things that by rights should not be possible; they noticed that words carried their sense in their bones, that the utterance of a name was an act of power, that certain inflections could charm or cast a spell or (as Yeats puts it) set the mind dreaming, and once the mind was set dreaming there was no saying what might emerge, perhaps something of universal and eternal significance.  Both Plato and Aristotle puzzled over the origins of words, trying to find the link between words and things, words and ideas, trying to see from what elements words put themselves together to “mean” what they did mean.  They devised or hinted at ingenious, learned, and perverse derivations for words, and because they took these matters seriously they sometimes played games with words and mocked themselves for doing so.  That fascination, I suppose, which was already highly cultivated in Plato, must have begun as soon as there was any awareness of language as articulate utterance distinct from reflex responses of fear, hunger, desire, and delight; and it has continued unabated, branching into grammar, lexicography, philology, the history of changes in form, usage, and meaning, changes in words as they pass from one language to another, comparative studies of languages genetically related and unrelated, and most recently into linguistics with a variety of special interests and methodical refinements.  Always the search for a primordial but immanent source has persisted, and the search for irreducible elements and first principles of language – in sonic, vectorial, syntactical, statistical, logical, mythical, and anthropological terms – continues.  Few areas of study show quite so clearly as the study of language does the scope of human ingenuity, or man’s capacity for dogged obscurantism and for those flashes of haphazard brilliance that restore from time to time our faith in the power of the human mind.  To suppose, as Coleridge did, that the verb “to think” really meant “to thing” (a vestigial reification?) was something that many people might have thought of; it took a more subtle sense to suggest that “thing” was a processive noun, being the present participle of the definite article.

Cumulatively, and by a process of mutual decimation, various analytical theories have extended our understanding of language and of much that language can do, refer to, or evoke; and language itself has become an increasingly refined instrument of analytical inquiry, particularly in philosophy even though Western philosophers have seldom ventured to encompass the scope of literary language in their philosophical discourse.  The simple lexicographical device, first introduced to English by Dr. Samuel Johnson, of offering, in addition to verbal equivalents and definitions, examples of the actual use of a word in its various functions and shades of implication, has had a refining and rectifying influence.  The attempt in recent years to achieve machine translation, which greatly stimulated the development of computers and computer codes but did not much extend our understanding of language, did establish (if anybody seriously needed convincing on these points) that language was not a mathematical notation, that the structural and coherent principles of language were not essentially logical, that we do not and cannot use language “by rule”, and that only in those uses of language where words become univocal signs can we safely assume that only the words have meaning, not the person that utters them.  In our own time technical analogies and procedures could be expected to be favoured, not merely because of the pervasive dominance of “science” and “the scientific method” but because the search of irreducible elements leads strongly towards an atomic analogy and an analytical technique.  But the power of scientific procedure depends upon certain conventional working assumptions: a clear and readily distinguishable division between “subject” and “object”, a causal nexus, and the disimplication of the observer; and by normally assuming a theory of perception (usually not specified) that excludes the feeling-tone attending any perceptual event, the “scientific method” tends to ignore the primary energetic principle in language.  These procedural axioms would seem on the face of it to conflict with the holistic, synthesizing, symbolic nature of language itself.  In recent years a few inquirers in linguistics, finding that some contemporary “models” of language were so rigid as to prejudice even the selection of evidential material, have refreshed themselves by turning back to earlier views of language which, growing out of a different social and epistemological setting, tell us things about language that to our embarrassment we seem to have forgotten or had overlooked as trivial.

Not very long ago a momentous recognition emerged from investigations in subatomic physics: that, as Heisenberg said, “methods and object can no longer be separated” – that the mere presence of an observer (or an observing instrument) alters what is being observed.  This probably makes little difference at many levels of macroscopic scientific observation, but it is something that we could always have known about any event in which language occurs: it obviously matters very much who is speaking (or writing), to whom, and in what circumstances, for what reason and in what frame of mind.  Since in the case of written language these details cannot be determined by any external or “objective” means, they have to be arrived at patiently by inference or intuition.  The results of the inferences seldom matter much except in so far as, by being turned back upon their linguistic source, they illuminate, vivify, clarify, help secure the precise integrity of what is being read.  We notice certain peculiarities about investigation into language.  Words and utterances have the distinctive character of what poets call données rather than of what scientists call data: data are raw materials to be worked on, données command and shape attention; and sensitive reading is absolutely different from “observing”.  In poetical use words can assume a strongly physical character, often tactual as well as sonic, and can induce a synaesthesic transfer from sense to sense.  A study of literature will also show a sensitive reader that articulated language tends to carry in itself the physical imprint of the writer’s “intention”, even though the intention may be below the threshold of the writer’s awareness; in this, as in other aspects of the dynamics of language, we can know that it is so even though we do not understand how it can be so.  Somehow or other matters of this sort – self-evident facts in the good reading of poetry – need to be taken into account if a theory of language is not to exclude certain radical functions of language that we see at work in literature.

In the study of literature it can easily be demonstrated how quickly the attempt to reflect upon a text can drift away from the peculiar demands of the text into working out some sort of abstractive construct, logically consistent with some details in the text it may be but peripheral to it, triggered by the poem but not shaped by it.  When this happens, the poem has been apprehended not as an identity-to-be-known-in-its-own-right but as a phenomenon to be drawn into the magnetic field of a concept that already exists in the mind.  The only way this drift can be prevented so that we sustainedly get to know the poem is by bringing the reflection back into resonance with the poem in alternating acts of synthesis – the “drift” being a process of analysis.  This is done not simply so that we can “keep our eye on the object” but because successive re-encounters with the original restore the physical and perceptual origins from which feeling flows and by which the feeling defines itself.  The same must be true of any attempt at systematic theoretical study of language; as soon as we treat language as a phenomenon-to-be-observed we begin to lose touch with the actual and peculiar axioms of language and may find ourselves substituting causality for resonance, treating words as individually non-vectorial and devoid of intrinsic function (because the functions are complex, difficult to discern, and impossible to predict), or treating words and functions as “things” which, like data, are all of equal emphasis and worth, working for convenience to an assumed subject/object relation when in fact the relation is intersubjective.

In any serious inquiry, method must be applied rigorously and consistently; but “rigour” belongs to the strictness with which a method of inquiry is pursued and has no necessary relation to the appropriateness of the method to the matter under inquiry.  The choice of a method, particularly if it is a technique not established out of reciprocal relation with the matter under inquiry, is strongly affected by the purpose or intention of the inquirer: certain techniques can be chosen, and have been chosen, out of destructive intent, as a mask for fear, contempt, or resentment, to produce logical support for rejective conclusions reached before the investigation seriously began.  Every method has its limits of relevance.  What matters in the end is the integrity of the matter under inquiry, illuminated and intrinsicated as much as it can be by whatever technical and analytical investigations we may have access to.  And what matters most in the end for the inquirer, if it is “truth” he is looking for, is his fidelity to the matter under inquiry rather than his devotion to a technique of inquiry.  The possibility and implications of false allegiance to technique would be of little more than academic interest if we did not often see it at work in the conduct of affairs, in the decisions of those who purport to ground their position on statistics, in the unexamined assumption that all quality can be quantified, that all judgment and decision is calculation and “problem-solving”, that all human action can be explained as a response to measurable forces working from without.

I believe that all detailed analytical studies of language – all of which are presumably valid in their own terms – should keep constantly in mind the irreducible complexity of language, its refusal (except in very limited zones of special activity) to subject itself exclusively to logical relations, and particularly its function – which may well be its radical function – as a process of discovery and inquiry.  I do not say “an instrument of inquiry”, because I do not mean simply that language provides a good way of setting down accurately the progress and conclusions of an inquiry, but that the virtue of an inquiry depends upon the clarity and deftness with which it processively realises itself in language.  For language is not merely an “instrument’ to be used and manipulated, even though we can degrade it to that service.  In some very real sense language has a life of its own and a will of its own, as well as a way of its own.  To use language well – that is, to find in action the nature of language – we have to find out how to induce language to come to our call; we have to be lucky with language so that it will offer to us what we certainly could not have contrived and even what we might never otherwise have discovered.

The thinking that emerges in speech or writing is thinking finding a body for itself as it goes; the successive acts of verbal discovery (linguistic decisions?) determine what next can be thought; the thinking discovers itself in the wording of it.  A writer’s obsessive desire for precision has no other source than this: as he moves forward in his wording, if each word is precisely what is needed where it is, he will continually discover as he moves forward; he will not merely be repeating what he already knows.  To put it negatively, every imprecise word, every function ineptly handled, every convenient blanket-term, cliché or piece of fashionable jargon will block, deflect, diffuse, and dissipate the thinking, turn it back on itself or switch it into some well-worn formulated channel that leads to the desert of banality or the ocean of tautology – a travesty of imagination.

In language if there is no rhythm there is no life; if there is no tune there is nothing to listen to; if there is nothing at stake, no concern, but interest only to inform, there is nothing worth hanging on to and nothing much worth saying.  If the difficulties of writing plain unadorned expository prose are formidable that is because there the situation is desperate: language takes its last stand and refuses to become mathematical notation.  On no account should a “simple” use of language be taken as typical of the nature of language altogether.  Rilke said that “in poetry as in life there are no classes for beginners; we are all expected to do the most difficult things first.”  The same applies to language.  The true nature of language is most clearly to be seen in the language we call “poetry” – things excellently made in words.  Whatever our specialised area of inquiry, whatever method or technique we decide to use, we must remember that sooner or later we shall encounter – or must ignore to our discomfiture – the fact that language is radically metaphorical, prelogical, paradoxical.  One inquiry that would be worth making would be to find out how a language like English has managed to accommodate itself to the rigorous requirements of propositional statement, semantic sequence and relation, logical and subordinative connection without ever losing the poetic character of its origins which all the discursive elements and focuses would seem to assail.

What I am saying, being a statement of certain blinding glimpses of the obvious, may perhaps in these days sound a little like a flourish on an apocalyptical trumpet.  If I had been demonstrating some of the complex functions of language that occur (say) in literature or in poems, that would have been quite a different essay.  What I wanted to notice is the complex functions that language can put us to, and to suggest that if we shirk the complexity of language we cripple or disarm our inquiry: also that if we allow ourselves to be persuaded that language is not essentially complex we renounce, and may destroy, what is perhaps our most precious gift, certainly our most distinctively human capacity.

Paul Valéry, in his reflections on his own poem Le Cimitière Marin, made a statement about literature that says better than I can say what the ground is for my faith in the regenerative powers of language to secure in the mind (that is, in the whole person) that tension between the highly complex and the astonishingly simple which we call sanity.

Literature interests me profoundly only to the extent to which it urges the mind to certain transformations – those in which the stimulating properties of language play the chief part. I can, indeed, take a liking for a book, read and reread it with delight; but it never possesses me wholly unless I find in it traces of a thought whose power is equal to that of language itself. The force to bend the common word to unexpected ends without violating the “time-honoured forms,” the capture and subjection of things that are difficult to say, and above all the simultaneous management of syntax, harmony, and   ideas (which is the problem of the purest poetry) are in my eyes the supreme objects of our art.

If as students, analysts, and proponents of language we believe, as I do, that language is always by its very nature potentially poetic – capable of a clear, vigorous, distinct, and substantial transformation of our minds, a construction of our selves –, we can keep that in mind whenever in our investigations we run the risk (or take the risk) of losing touch with the realities of language.  When we follow some glimpse or hunch to its limit – which is usually the limit of absurdity – we shall certainly lose touch.  When that happens we need to be sure that we do not also lose our nerve and propose as a substitute for language some abstract and plausible construction that, for all its ingenuity and intricacy, is bound to be a parody or caricature, and certainly lacking the order and complexity of the language it purports to refer to.  I think that it is our grasp of language, and our need of it, that secures us against deteriorating into jellies or machines.  I think that there is no complexity that our minds can entertain that goes beyond the complexity of language, and that language may well exist to preserve the agile, fluent, inventive complexity of our minds, with the flair and yearning for unity and simplicity, by continuously engaging our minds in its own complexity.