We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think

by Shirley Hazzard

  To take, as Leopardi does, the familiar Homeric point of departure, is to accept that literary indirection set in early. We have whole schools of explication on this theme. Last lecture I quoted Werner Jaeger’s view that the advent of Christianity reinforced rather than introduced the separation of aesthetic literary values from functional ones [Ed.: See note 12]. Norman Douglas, irreverent pagan, says of the Greek Anthology that:

  In the older epigrams, there is present that eye for detail, that touch of earth—bitter or sweet. Slowly it fades away. Even before the commencement of the Christian era concrete imagery tends to be replaced by abstractions. The process was never arrested. The Christians could not allow these things of earth, dear to pagans, to be of much account. They looked inwards, guiding their conduct no longer in relation to tangible objects but to an intangible postulate; and so attained ghostly values. A kind of spiritual dimness had begun to creep over the world.56

  Douglas felt that even in the translation of classical texts there is some “Anglo-Saxon or Teutonic ferment that produces a saccharine deposit. The mischief has its roots in our gothic distrust of clean thinking.” To Douglas, Walter Pater himself was “a noble exponent of the diabetic school. By some alchemy, everything he wrote became charged with a sugary infiltration.”57

  Consciousness is the paradox of human error. Intelligence makes it possible, at least, for Man to establish in retrospect the instant at which they went off the rails; and many institutions and careers have been raised on minute study of our derailments. What is not possible is to resume the collective journey. It is left for a few indigent artists to resume the route on foot. Through art we can feel, as well as know, what we have lost; in art, as in dreams, we can occasionally retrieve and re-experience it. Through art, we can respond ideally to truth, as we cannot in life. It is possible, from time to time, through inspired language, to strike the note of immemorial immediacy.

  Immediacy of language is not always or necessarily simplicity. Valéry says that of two words, one must choose the lesser.58 But we do not always have a lesser word that will meet our need. Heidegger describes the properties of ancient language as distinct and distinguished. Spontaneous directness of oral expression, and simplicity as an instrument of considered language, are different things: a man or woman articulating urgent emotion is not acting under the same impetus as a writer who, from a pondered vocabulary, chooses for best effect and excludes excess. However, urgency does generate a compulsion to truth—just as discursiveness can be an index of falsehood—and veracity tends to express itself with an eminent simplicity—to rise, as it were, to occasion.

  In the spring of 1940, when France was falling, Churchill’s address to the British nation opened with the words, “The news from France is very bad.”59 A brief sentence of measured sounds, almost entirely composed of words of one syllable. A few years earlier, Churchill had drafted the king’s speech of abdication, which (somewhat paradoxically in the circumstances) began with the following sentence: “At last I am able to say a few words of my own.”60 Again, a brief, balanced sentence of single syllables, almost entirely composed of words of Anglo-Saxon or at least non-Latin derivation. In both these instances, a masterful simplicity, a noble difference, gives force and inevitability to seemingly commonplace words. The space has been cleared for them. Dignity and candor are indivisible, and there is a sense of humility before the event; of the self subdued. The occasion and its articulation are at one.

  Without diminishing the merits and advantages of brevity, however, literature cannot be looked on as a competition to employ as few words as possible. Rather it is a matter of seeking accurate words to convey a state of mind and imagination. And of deploying words so that tone, context, and sound are ideally combined, without any show of contrivance. That is the proper and agonizing business of literature, in which much of the writer’s sufferings originate: “the intolerable wrestle with words and meanings,” as Eliot called it.61 Every writer who is serious about his craft experiences this sense of professing pure meaning with unworthy words. Flaubert told George Sand:

  When I come upon a bad assonance or a repetition in one of my sentences, I’m sure I’m floundering in the false. By dint of searching I find the proper expression, which was always the only one, and which is, at the same time, harmonious. The word is never lacking when one possesses the idea. Is there not in this precise fitting of parts, something eternal, like a principle? If not, why should there be a relation between the right word and the musical word? Or why should the greatest compression of thought always result in a line of poetry?”62

  Great practitioners of language have supplied new words and new usages when, in the literal sense, words failed them. In most cases we echo their innovations unthinkingly, because they satisfy, they meet the case. At other times they bear the maker’s seal so distinctly that they can’t be uttered without a mental nod in the author’s direction. And then there are inventions that cannot be appropriated. When Shakespeare speaks of the “painful warrior, famous’d for fight,” or of “fleeting Clarence,” or of “the hearts that spaniel’d me at heels,” we take his meaning perfectly, but the invention lapses with a single use.63 In any case these great innovators cannot provide a pattern for lesser talents. Magnitude, as Jacques Barzun says, creates its own space.64

  More usually, the writer works with words in common use, developing as great a range as possible. Some will bring the whole weight of language to bear. Dr. Johnson said that he could have compiled his dictionary from Bacon’s works alone.65 For the imaginative writer, words are the measure of talent—to an extent not necessarily true for writers dealing in information and ideas. The intentions of a novelist or poet are of course important, but he must be judged on talents of expression that may not be commensurate with them. The intentions of a historian or a critic, on the other hand, necessarily form the basis of our ultimate judgment of his writings, whatever his abilities or deficiencies of communication. The ear of the imaginative writer is ideally tuned to the highest sensitivity, and his method of transcription is perhaps somewhat misleadingly called style. Asked to justify the employment of “fine allusions, bright images, and elegant phrases,” Dr. Johnson responded with what might be considered a definition of style: “Why sir, all these ornaments are useful, because they obtain an easier reception for the truth.”66 It is a recurring error of criticism, I think, to treat “style” as an insubstantial literary contrivance distinct from the author’s so-called “material.”

  I have called this talk “The Defense of Candor” because the writer’s vigilance over language and his consciousness of its erosion and abuse is a theme running through literature, an indirect commentary, often benign but taking the form of exposure of pretension. I don’t refer to satire exclusively, although the English language has been notably congenial to satire—Satire, according to Byron, is the only weapon that doesn’t rust in the British climate.67 In Pope’s view, ridicule was the sole corrective for the inveterate offender: “O sacred weapon, left for truth’s defence, / Sole dread of folly, vice, and insolence.”68 However, the aspect I would most like to draw attention to here is rather that satire is much less the literary desire to hold offenders up to salutary public scorn than to depict character and eternal human characteristics. In literature this portrayal turns on a use of words, and often of a single word; in the novel it is most frequently rendered through qualities of speech, as in this very modern observation from George Eliot’s Middlemarch:

  Mr. Vincy felt sure it would not be long before he heard of Mr. Featherstone’s demise. The felicitous word “demise,” which had seasonably occurred to him, had raised his spirits even above their usual evening pitch. The right word is always a power. Considered as a demise, old Featherstone’s death assumed a merely legal aspect, so that Mr. Vincy could tap his snuff box over it and be jovial, without even an intermittent affectation of solemnity.69

  The novelist’s defense of candor could be well illustrated through this book
alone. I know of no work of fiction other than Proust in which character is so consistently illustrated through language. I confess I was tempted to give this talk exclusively on Middlemarch. Concern with words and sounds runs through the book as a conscious theme—there is even a scene of a grammar lesson given by a mother to her child. There is Mrs. Bulstrode, who felt that “in using the superior word ‘militate’ she had thrown a noble drapery over a mass of particulars.”70 There is Mr. Casaubon who, even in saying “Yes,” manages with a “peculiar pitch of voice [to make] the word half a negative”71—and a drop of whose blood is said to show, under a magnifying glass, nothing but “semicolons and parentheses.”72 There is Mr. Trumbull, “an amateur of superior phrases”73 with a way of saying, “‘It commences well.’ (Things never began with Mr. Borthrop Trumbull: they always commenced…).”74 George Eliot, referring in this book to a new self-consciousness in language, speaks of what she calls “the lusty ease” of Fielding’s “fine [eighteenth-century] English,” which seems, she says, as if delivered from an armchair on a proscenium, while her own contemporaries and she herself produce what she calls “thin and eager chat, as if delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house.”75

  Writers have immemorially delighted in puncturing pretensions of speech. One need but recall the poem of Catullus, “Arrius,” or Hamlet with Polonius.76 It seems strange to find George Eliot lamenting the decline of English at a time when fluency and genius of expression appear unsurpassed in our literature. However, the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century was bringing about what might be called an industrial revolution in thought and language, and an accelerated change in the long evolution of formal speech. The treatment of individual speech in literature first appears in English in the medieval rendering of types—especially of rustics—through the medium of vernaculars. There was also a special tone of language for genres of literature—as the tone of the epic is different from that of romance. It is with the development of the drama, and departure from the rules of rhetoric, that men and women begin to speak with their own personalities.

  This was a humanistic assumption of individual responsibility, as we have continued, in theory at least, to consider it. Each person’s words, in literature as in life, are accepted as a revelation of their nature, and an index of the measure of responsibility they were prepared to assume for it. As Gabriel observes to Satan: “Evasion is rooted in fear as responsibility arises from conviction.”77 The sense of individual responsibility through words has proved very hard to maintain—it seems that the medieval forms of class responsibility provided a shelter that has been sought ever since through linguistic embellishment and evasion. William Empson wrote of the seventeenth century that what was said of the Emperor Augustus in relation to Rome might be said of Dryden and the English language: that he found it brick and left it marble.78 This, of course, was not necessarily an improvement. Another great change sets in with the nineteenth century. Along with the transforming powers of technology there came a stronger tendency to renounce personal in favor of generalized or expert opinion, and to evade self-knowledge through use of abstractions; a wish to believe in some process more generalized or efficient than human feeling. By the 1870s Trollope was able to introduce the following dialogue as conversation at a fashionable party. Speaking of a friend, Phineas Finn says to a young woman:

  “…. He is the most abstract and concrete man I know.

  “Abstract and concrete!”

  “You are bound to use adjectives of that sort now, Miss Palliser, if you mean to be anybody in conversation.”79

  There was also the associated new phenomenon of mass communications and mass advertising—that is, of new words not spontaneously but speciously brought into being as a means of profitably controlling human impulse. We have a young man of Middlemarch, for instance, renouncing use of the word “superior” because, as he says, “There are too many superior teas and sugars these days. Superior is getting to be shopkeepers’ slang.”80 That scene is set in 1831, although of course Middlemarch was written several decades later. In 1834, in Le Père Goriot, the residents of the pension Vauquer take up the suffix “-rama,” which has been recently publicized in connection with the invention of diorama; “-rama” is facetiously appended to every other word while the fad lasts. Observations of the kind abound in Dickens, along with an extraordinary prescience for the dehumanizing properties of all jargon, particularly of bureaucratic jargon—for instance, he sets his Circumlocution Office in Bleeding Heart Yard, and prophesies it will lead to Britannia’s downfall.

  I have spoken of a renunciation of independent and eccentric views that accompanied the growth of mass culture. In aesthetic matters this has also been encouraged by an assumption of critical authority that, in the words of one modern critic, will “deal expertly” with literature and other arts, relieving readers of time-consuming burdens of private choice. While commentary and scholarly attention have always existed toward literature, and always will, a new body of attitudes has developed that seems to seek to neutralize the very directness to life which is nurtured by art. This phenomenon is notably one of explication rather than comprehension—the concept of art as a discipline to be contained within consistent laws, the seductive promise of a technology to be mastered by those who will then be equipped to dictate taste. There is the wish to dictate a view rather than accept the submission required by art—a submission akin to generosity or love, which evokes the individual response rather than the authorized one. Art is not technology, it is an endless access to revelatory states of mind, a vast extension of living experience, and a way of communing with the dead. An intimacy with truth, through which, however much instruction is provided and absorbed, each of us must pass alone.

  The degradation of language in the extreme versions of these explicatory approaches to the arts should be the first concern of anyone wishing to penetrate and rehabilitate them. The so-called clinical approach necessitates a dehumanized and labored vocabulary. (A reputation becomes “canonical status,” a life together is a “symbiotic relationship” and so on. And I have even heard at Princeton works of literature referred to as systematized narratology.) There seems to be little awareness of the lesson that lies in language psychiatry. While certain of the academic and journalistic mills grind small over “the creative impulse,” the impulses of critics have attracted less attention. Yet the restless Unconscious of the critical body deserves some exploration, if only to probe its effects on the life of the imagination, and to discover why critics of this kind so seldom step aside to allow art to speak, inimitably, for itself—art often appearing to be regarded by them as “mere material” for dissection and classification.

  Much of this encroachment of abstract language derives from a modern inability for wholeness; a modern incapacity for synthesis. While it poses as a higher seriousness, abstraction is perhaps another stage in the long attempt to neutralize the mysteries that are inimical to human vanity. Inimical, that is, to self-knowledge. Seneca, writing to a friend about the beauty of literature, remarks that when a literary critic goes through the same book, he emerges mainly with the news that Ennius filched the idea from Homer and that Virgil filched it from Ennius, and so on. He says, “To my mind, no one lets humanity down so much as these people who study knowledge as if it were some sort of technical skill.”81 One could cite a thousand such observations from every period of literature—Shakespeare is full of them, as when Horatio remarks that Hamlet will need marginal notes to follow the speech of Osric, or when Richard II speaks of thoughts that are so “intermix’d with scruples that they set the word itself against the word.”82 Chesterton tells us that “the north is full of tangled things and texts and aching eyes; / and gone is all the innocence of anger and surprise.”83

  I think the defense of candor intensified to meet new incursions when they showed their new modern power. The rumble of abstractions runs through much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature as a threat to individual being. We
believe in the crushing weight of Mr. Gradgrind’s dreadful facts, as, alas, we do not believe in Dickens’s redemption of this linguistic sinner. In a section of Ford Madox Ford’s Parade’s End, during a love scene between two principals who are sitting by a fireside, we are told that in the same room, “A Mr. Jegg and a Mrs. Haviland were sitting together in the window-seat. From time to time, Mr. Jegg used the word, ‘inhibition.’” The love scene proceeds by the fire, and then we’re told: “Behind their backs the fire rustled. Across the room, Mrs. Jegg said, ‘The failure to coordinate.’”84

  This is as much a modern background as the proclamations about cows and pigs that arise from the country fair in Madame Bovary while a love scene takes place in a room above; or the incongruously frivolous offstage music heard in the Tales of Hoffman as a murder takes place. However, one might now feel that the chorus of dehumanized expression has prevailed, while the word expressive of the root of life can be heard only in an occasional aside, or through the din.

  3. POSTERITY: “THE BRIGHT REVERSION”