Language

An Element of Fiction

Language is an element of fiction like oxygen is an element of air. Literally. Whatever else you do, what other tools of craft you deploy, without words, in other words, language, you’re obviously heading for a mute nowhere.

Most writers are very aware of this and many of them have shared their thoughts on the subject. So let’s dig in.

Gunter Grass opens the door: “Language can be something like home for a writer.”

William Wordsworth also highlights the basic nature of language when he says, “Language is not the dress but the incarnation of thought.”

In his Wen Fu Lu Chi says, “Thoughts rise from the heart on breezes, and language finds its speaker.”

“At a certain pitch of awareness of language, one can make marvelous leaps,” says the poet Denise Levertov

Jorge Luis Borges, a language wizard if there ever was one, puts it this way, “Language is an efficient ordering of the world’s enigmatic abundance. Or, in other words, we invent nouns to fit reality.”

Guy Davenport observes, “Language itself is continuously an imaginative act.”

“When you have made a new sentence,” says Pat Conroy, “or even an image that works well, it is a palace where language itself has lit a new lamp.”

While Socrates warns us, “The misuse of language induces evil in the soul.”

And Ray Grigg astutely observes, “Words are metaphors for what they represent. They are never the thing itself.”

Joseph Conrad, who did not learn English until his teens, shares: “I have a strange and overpowering feeling that it had always been an inherent part of myself. English was for me neither a matter of choice nor adoption. The merest idea of choice had never entered my head. And as to adoption — well, yes, there was adoption; but it was I who was adopted by the genius of the language, which directly I came out of the stammering stage made me its own so completely that its very idiom I truly believe had a direct action on my temperament and fashioned my still plastic character.”

Edward Sapir, an amazing anthropologist and linguist, probably knew more about language than any man that has ever walked the earth, before or since. I will share several of his quotes from his book, appropriately titled Language. This, by the way, if you are at all interested in language, is a book I highly recommend. So, take it away, Mr. Sapir:

“The latent content of all languages is the same — the intuitive science of experience… nothing more or less than a collective art of thought.”

“Languages are more to us than systems of thought transference. They are invisible garments that drape themselves about our spirit and give a predetermined form to all their symbolic expression. When the expression is unusual significance, we call it literature.”

“The possibilities of individual expression are infinite, language in particular is the most fluid of mediums.”

“The artist has intuitively surrendered to the inescapable tyranny of the material, made its brute nature fuse easily with his conception. The material “disappears” precisely because there is nothing in the artist’s conception to indicate that any other material exists. For the time being, he, and we with him, move in the artistic medium as a fish moves in the water, oblivious of the existence of an alien atmosphere. No sooner, however, does the artist transgress the law of his medium than we realize with a start that there is a medium to obey. Language is the medium of literature as marble or bronze or clay are the materials of the sculptor.” [My italics]

Barry Hannah confesses, “I write out of greed for lives and language. A need to listen to the orchestra of living.

“The language still strikes me as a miracle, a thing the deepest mind adores. At its best, when you lose your arrogance and are least selfish, it can sing back to you almost as a disembodied friend.”

Jacques Barzun observes, “Language is either the incarnation of our thoughts and feelings or a cloak for their absence.”

Elizabeth Bowen puts it beautifully, “Our ideal therefore, must be a language as clear as glass — the person looking out of the window knows there is glass there, but he is not concerned with it; what concerns him is what comes through from the other side.”

The always precise and pragmatic Ayn Rand, “Literature is an art form which uses language as its tool — and language is an objective instrument. You cannot seriously approach writing without the strict premise that words have objective meanings.

“Dagny [Taggart in Atlas Shrugged] regarded language as a tool of honor, always to be used as if one were under oath — an oath of allegiance to reality.”

Flannery O’Connor also warns, “I think that anything that makes you overly conscious of the language is bad for the story usually.”

The brilliant writer and teacher John Gardner, “It is true that one of the great pleasures afforded by good books is the writer’s fine handling of language.

“Shakespeare fits language to its speaker and occasion, as the best writers always do. In the work of Shakespeare, brilliant language always serves character and action. However splendid it may be, Shakespeare’s language is finally subservient to character and plot.”

Says Thomas Carlyle, “All passionate language does of itself become musical. The speech of a man even in zealous anger becomes a chant, a song.”

“Language to me is sacrosanct,” says John Fowles. “I won’t accept the argument that one must write for the common man. In countless things in life, I’m all for the common man. But I think, with language itself, there really are no let-outs. You have to make it as rich as you can because you’re preserving the richness of language.”

Then he adds, “I’m all for richness in language, and if people can’t understand then they can bloody well go elsewhere. Buy a dictionary or something.

“I adore language, and especially English with its incomparable richness. I think of that richness less as a doomed attempt to impose order on chaos than as an attempt to magnify reality. I have no time for the old socialist belief that you must avoid all rare words and communicate by the lowest common denominators alone. As well say you must use inferior tools.”

Says William Sloane, “The English language is the greatest single tool of man’s long history.”

S.I. Hayakawa advises, “Learning language is not simply a matter of learning words; it is a matter of correctly relating our words to the things and happenings for what they stand.”

As for Carlos Fuentes, “Like bread and love, language is shared with others.”

Another bit of advice from Jacques Barzun: “There is really but one way to tighten one’s grip on language and that is by reading.”

Let’s return to the deep well of Edward Sapir, “It [language] is the most significant and colossal work that the human spirit has evolved — nothing short of a finished form of expression for all communicable experience.”

“Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know.”

“Literature moves in language as a medium, but that medium comprises two layers, the latent content of language — our intuitive record of experience — and the particular conformation of a given language — the specific how of our record of experience. Literature that draws its sustenance mainly — never entirely — from the lower level, say a play of Shakespeare’s, is translatable without too great a loss of character. If it moves in the upper rather than in the lower level — a fair example is a lyric of Swinburne’s — it is as good as untranslatable.”

“A truly deep symbolism…. does not depend on the verbal associations of a particular language but rests securely on an intuitive basis that underlies all linguistic expression.”

“The artist’s ‘intuition,’ to use Croce’s term, is immediately fashioned out of a generalized human experience — thought and feeling — of which his own individual experience is a highly personalized selection. The thought relations in this deeper level have no specific linguistic vesture; the rhythms are free, not bound, in the first instance, to the traditional rhythms of the artist’s language. Certain artists whose spirit moves largely in the non-linguistic (better, in the generalized linguistic) layer even find a certain difficulty in getting themselves expressed in the rigidly set terms of their accepted idiom. One feels that they are unconsciously striving for a generalized art language, a literary algebra, that is related to the sum of all known languages as a perfect mathematical symbolism is related to all the roundabout reports of mathematical relations that normal speech is capable of conveying. Their art expression is frequently strained, it sounds at times like a translation from an unknown original — which, indeed, is precisely what it is.” Edward Sapir [My italics]

“The greatest — or shall we say most satisfying — literary artists, the Shakespeares and Heines, are those who have known subconsciously to fit or trim the deeper intuition to the provincial accents of their daily speech.” Edward Sapir [My italics]

“Every language is itself a collective art of expression. There is concealed in it a particular set of esthetic factors — phonetic, rhythmic, symbolic, morphological — which it does not completely share with any other language.”

Salman Rushdie concedes, “English is by now the world language.”

He then goes on to elaborate, “What seems to me to be happening [in India] is that those peoples who were once colonized by the language are now rapidly remaking it, domesticating it, becoming more and more relaxed about the way they use it — assisted by the English language’s enormous flexibility and size, they are carving out large territories for themselves within its frontiers.” Salman Rushdie

Boris Pasternak says the following in Doctor Zhivago, “After two or three stanzas and several images by which he was struck, his work took possession of him and he felt the approach of what is called inspiration. At such moments the relation of the forces that determine artistic creation is, as it were, reversed. The dominant thing is no longer the state of mind the artist seeks to express but the language in which he wants to express it. Language, the home and receptacle of beauty and meaning, itself begins to think and speak for man and turns wholly into music, not in terms of sonority but in terms of the impetuousness and power of its inward flow. Then, like the current of a mighty river polishing stones and turning wheels by its very movement, the flow of speech creates in passing, by virtue of its own laws, meter, rhythm, and countless other relationships, which are even more important, but which are as yet unexplored, insufficiently recognized, and unnamed.”

Personally, I believe that the greatest book ever written is a good dictionary.

© Wolfstuff