Strong Language Preamble

There are two uses of the term ‘strong language’, one very familiar and the other less so. This is about the second kind.

The usual one: Anthony Burgess’s description of an army mechanic banging under the hood with his spanner and shouting ‘the fucking fucker’s fucking fucked’, letting the world know well enough how his project was going, but with no more specificity than the barking of a dog.

But ‘strong’ is a word that comes, as it were, from the depths, and metaphorizes (or perhaps metonymizes) very freely. So when Clive James said that the King James Bible was translated when the English language was so strong that even a committee could write it, we all know what he meant.

This second kind of strength takes us out of the modes of communication that we share with barking dogs and other social animals, and into the mode that is privy to our species: language’s capacity to show us the world – to say things, to refer, to tell us about.

But here we come to another distinction. Language tells two kinds of truth. There is the truth of lawyers and scientists and investigative journalists – the truth of formulation, pieced out from the flux of the world and checkable against that flux in (mostly indirect) ways. This – we might for the moment call it Truth A – is made possible by formal or implicit agreements on the meanings of the words employed. It allows any degree of personal removal from the smell and feel, the how, the impress, of what is being spoken of or written about. Such a truth, whatever its import, can become no more redolent of the living reality it stands for than a piece of algebra, dying back into a husk: special; heritage; passionate.

But living within the gridlines of this kind of truth is Truth B, the second kind, mostly in a state of gradual fade but rarely dissolving completely. It has been said of Jack Kerouac that he wasn’t trying to save the world by writing, or discover the good life, or even tell a story - what he wanted was to say what everything is like. Truth B is the truth of what everything is like. This truth you can’t stand back from – in fact you can only perceive it if you allow yourself to stand forward, into it.

Strong language (my usage) tells this second kind of truth. It tells you what it’s like. Just one example (there’ll be many more in the book) – from a work packed with strong language: The Journals of Sylvia Plath. At a chaotic Cambridge party, a few minutes into her first meeting with Ted Hughes, he is

... asking me if I wanted brandy, and me yelling yes and backing into the next room ... and bang the door was shut and he was sloshing brandy into a glass and I was sloshing it at the place where my mouth was when I last knew about it.

The opening moments of the most famous poetic partnership since the Brownings, if not ever. There might be twenty ways to describe the same scene with the same factual accuracy but without entering it, without in the least saying what it was like. In fact Truth B plays fast and loose with Truth A – that moment-capturing final clause (the place where my mouth was ...), perfectly hooking a what-it’s-like Truth B, is merely banal from a Truth A perspective.

But this isn’t just – or even generally – a matter of subjective versus objective. People regularly (ever more often, in fact) recount the most personal details of their lives without a trace of strength in the language they use. On the other hand Gerard Manley Hopkins (in his notebooks especially), D.H. Lawrence (pretty well always, when he wasn’t sounding off), and indeed Ted Hughes (in his nature poetry, in the wonderful but brutal Moorfield Diary), all give meticulous and unselfish descriptions of great strength.

Holism versus reductionism gets nearer the mark, but we must be wary of hasty theoretical closure – the what-it’s-like of strength is often holistic, a whole scene or face or event or whatever that would slip the mesh of any grid of particulars, but equal strength might be found in a razor-edged exactitude in naming those very particulars.

Howsoever. Strong language has been noticed at least since Aristotle, who came up (a little obliquely) with the notion of ‘poetic truth’. That formulation was revived and chewed over in criticism and (less so) in philosophy in the 19th Century and still breaks surface in the 20th, but without finding decent purchase. It has been difficult to establish a ground from which to take it as seriously as it seems to want to be taken.

That has changed, though (and this might be the main thing I want to say), since the work of the philosopher Heidegger. Heidegger wrote a great deal about language, and my take on strong language is no more than a widening-out of his – which is that poetic truth is the disclosure, the ‘unconcealment’, of beings in their Being (the deific capital, though its transfer across from the German has become unfashionable, makes a murky but important point). He tended to restrict that unconcealment to a small elite of poets and thinkers. I propose a radical democratisation – that low levels of strength permeate all language, and that higher levels, though scarce, can turn up pretty well anywhere.

Heidegger doesn’t use the term ‘poetic truth’. In fact he dropped ‘truth’ entirely as a word for ‘unconcealment’, I think mistakenly – the legalistic kind of truth (what I’ve called Truth A) turns out to be dependent on this primary truth, secondary to it. Beings have to be ‘unconcealed’ before language can get a legalistic purchase on them. Strong language, on this view, catches the pre-legalistic immediacy of that unconcealment. (There’s a large and vexed issue of the degree to which the beings in question are in fact constituted by language – I believe that Heidegger swerved off the rails on this one, with most of literary theory and much of Continental philosophy keenly following.)

Anyhow, Heidegger enables a crucial reversal of roles – ‘poetic truth’ is not a decorative adjunct to the nuts-and-bolts kind, but the ground that makes the nuts-and-bolts kind possible. It follows that strength in language is not a chromatic enhancement, desirable perhaps but serving no real purpose – it is, rather, a primary condition, from which our mundane modes, however useful (and sometimes all the more useful for having been bleached of their strength), are etiolated abstractions.

Heidegger, then, gave strength in language its proper importance, though (I claim) he missed much of the breadth of application he had opened up. A lot of it was tied in with a dodgy and semi-mystical elitism, that the important Heidegger critic John Caputo called his ‘great Greco-German metanarrative’. You suspect he’d have read Sylvia Plath’s journals (assuming his English was up to the idioms) with a nostril curled in disdain.

So much for the thesis. It will all be spelled out, more lucidly I hope and anyway at greater length, in the book. Writing which has come to seem like carrying sacks of coal to upper storey flats – necessary in its way but by not always congenial. Hence this blog, which I hope will take in the scenery on the way, and so reoxygenate the thing a little.

If you’re interested and would like to comment please contact me via the ‘Contact’ page.