Listening to language and the experience of poetry - 2

Last week I referred to the fact that the phrase "listening to language" was put into wide circulation by the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. He is, to be sure, a controversial figure; his association with Nazism for a short period has permanently tainted his reputation. At the same time, most discerning philosophers regard him very highly, some claiming that he was the most original thinker of the twentieth century. He had important things to say about a range of topics including language, poetry and art. Heidegger's approach to language is one that deserves the closest of attention, especially of those of us interested in poetry. His favourite poet was Holderlin, and he has very many interesting observations to make about Holderlin's poetry and the way language works in and through his poems. We in Sri Lanka have not paid adequate attention to Heidegger's thought in general, and his specific views on language, poetry and art in particular.

Let us first examine in broad outline Martin Heidegger's understanding of language. There are two broad approaches to language instrumental and constitutive. The first emphasizes the fact that language is an instrument of communication; we exchange ideas, thoughts, opinions that are pre-formed through the medium of language. Those who subscribe to this view believe that language can best be understood within a picture of life. This means that language arises from within this framework, but the framework itself operates independently of, or prior to, language. The constitutive theory, on the other hand, states the reverse; language is no mere instrument of thought, but rather that it is constitutive of thought.

Heidegger subscribed to an extreme form of this constitutive theory. He said that it is not man that speaks language but language that speaks though man. He said, "We do not merely speak the language" we have already listened to language. What do we hear? We hear language speaking. His central trope of language was that it was the house of being. This captures neatly the essence of his thinking on language. He was of the firm conviction that it is not possible for us to step outside language, because human beings are inescapably within language already. Heidegger, then, is not interested in the surface phenomena of language, the communication that transpires within a context that is already fashioned, but rather in the manner in which language makes that very context possible. He once remarked, "only when there is language is there world."

In order to understand Heidegger's constitutive approach to language, we need to pay close attention to the way he commented upon, and analyzed, Holderlin's poetry. The language of poetry was for him supreme. The importance of poetry for Heidegger resides in the fact that it reproduces the original moment before speech. This original moment is marked by our willingness to allow language to speak to us. In an essay titled, "Language in the Poem", which deals with the poetry of Georg Trakl, Heidegger remarks that, "The dialogue of thinking with poetry aims to call forth the nature of language, so that mortals may learn to live with language again." What he is saying is that language in the poem should be regarded as an opening to language, and it is only by listening to language that we can situate ourselves in the very existence of the world.

What this discussion about Heidegger's attitude to language and his vision of poetry tells us about our own endeavours to study Sinhala poetry in terms of the uniqueness of a given language and its intersections of phonetic and syntactic structure are the following: Language should be seen as constitutive of meaning, nothing happens outside language; we operate within a linguistic universe, the uniqueness of languages and their respective and informing sound patterns merit very close study.

That is why he underlined the importance of listening to language. The way he deploys it, the phrase has metaphysical ramifications. However, even to reach that level of analysis, we need to start by listening to language literally. Heidegger was not only speaking in highly abstract terms but also in terms of the specificities of the German language. Restrictively, he believed in the superiority of German over other languages.

In pursuing the theme of the uniqueness of language, phonetic structures and the experience of poetry, let us now turn to another important literary theorist Maurice Blanchot. He is unfortunately not well-known among literary scholars in Sri Lanka. Blanchot is a literary theorist and critic, a thinker, journalist, novelist who has had a great influence among French intellectuals from the 1940s until the present. He has won the admiration of thinkers such as Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida; the distinguished literary critic Paul de man said that Blanchot is "the most eminent literary and cultural critic in France." His work straddles philosophy and literature, simultaneously belonging to both and not identifying with either.

Blanchot, to be sure, is not an easy writer to read; he deals with abstractions, presents his ideas aphoristically and demands intense attention. His prose is often powered by the love of paradox. I first read his well-known book, "The Space of Literature" in the early 1980s, but found it heavy-going; it is only after I had studied phenomenology, post-structuralism that I was able to comprehend the curve of his thought.

This is not to suggest that aren't any residual obscurities that stand in between his language and my understanding of it. In this book, there are statements such as, "The central point of the work of art is the work as origin, the point which cannot be reached, yet the only one which is worth reaching" or "In the language of the world, language as the being of language and as the language of being keeps still". A great deal of concentrated thinking and reflection is needed to unpack the meaning of sentences such as the above which are strewn throughout the pages of his books.

Maurice Blanchot was influenced up to a point by Heidegger's thought, and like Heidegger was a great admirer of the poet Holderlin. Yet their sight-lines and exegetical paths diverge considerably. Blanchot, too, had some very stimulating observations to make about language and literature that are deeply relevant to my current undertaking, namely, to establish the importance of exploring the interconnections among linguistic uniqueness, sound patterns of a language and the experience of poetry.

I stated earlier Heidegger's conviction that language speaks man and not the other way around. Similarly, Blanchot observed, "The mistake is to believe language is an implement man has at his disposal in order to act or manifest himself in the world; language in reality has man at its disposal to the extent that it guarantees him the existence of the world and his existence in the world."

Blanchot was perennially obsessed with the problematic possibility of literature. He sought to unravel this riddle through language. He rejected the transportational model of language which perceives language as a vehicle, a carrier of meaning.

He thought otherwise; he discarded what he thought was the privileging of the message over the medium. In literature, especially in poetry, if it is successful, this subservience of language is eliminated; in literature "or as Blanchot sometimes called it writing" the medium seeks to defy and overpower the message and foreground itself.

In doing so, language allows phonetic structures, sound patterns, rhythms, alliterations, verbal textures, to rise to a commanding position.

For Blanchot, as for the poet Mallarme from whom he drew inspiration, what is of importance is not that which is articulated through language but language itself. Blanchot's deeply held conviction was that in literary works, words are liberated from the transportational function of carrying meaning, so as to create its own dense and distinctive world through alliances with other worlds.

Just like Heidegger's approach to language, that of Blanchot too, is deeply intertwined with philosophical imagination. They are both focusing on the being of language, or to use a high-sounding word, ontology of language. What is interesting from our immediate point of view is that they both focus on the uniqueness of language and how acoustic textures are vitally connected with that uniqueness. This opens up a potentially productive pathway to the analysis of the nature of the poetic experience and the controlling influence of language.

Heidegger and Blanchot are, of course, not the only two who sought to foreground language. The Prague structuralists, Russian formalists also peddled this line of thinking. They talked about the automatization and foregrounding of words; in the economy of everyday speech language is automatized or routinized and in poetry it is foregrounded. As Mukarovsky, one of the leading luminaries of the Prague school asserted, "The function of poetic language consists in the maximum foregrounding of the utterance." He went on to say that, "in poetic language foregrounding achieves maximum intensity to the extent of pushing communication to the background as the objective of expression and of being used for its own sake; it is not used in the service of communication but in order to place in the foreground the act of expression, the act of speech itself." It is indeed true that the place of origin and destination of the thought of the Prague school is very different from that of Heidegger and Blanchot. However, what they stress is important. Although the Prague structuralists had many interesting things to say, they were sadly crushed under their own weight of formalistic obsessions.

What the discussion so far should signpost is the following: different theorists have seen the important nexus between the uniqueness of a language, its sound patterns and meaning and the need to foreground language itself rather than casting it in an ancillary role. As Foucault once remarked , it is perfectly legitimate to use prior concepts in a selective way for one's own purposes. This is exactly what I have done far. The foregrounding of language and the careful attention to its phonetic structure are important moves in our project of understanding the complex and overwhelming presence of language in the poetic experience. I have chosen to press into service this formidable theoretical arsenal in order to construct a frame of intelligibility that would allow us to examine the specific conjunction of the uniqueness of the Sinhala language, its phonetic structure and the experiencing of Sinhala poetry, which I plan to undertake in future columns.

(To be continued )