Primal language is poetic language. This does not mean that primitive man, like the poet, paced about all day on tiptoe, plucking his beard and searching with an exhausted heart for verses; it means that primal language possessed a rich sensuous connotation, and in this it is one with poetic language. It is precisely poetry that has preserved the sensuous quality of primal language and strives to return to the linguistic state of primal naming, so as to win what Novalis called its “magic.” From this angle, poetry is the renaming of the world.
1. Naming at the Dawn of Chaos
It is by naming the world that man comes, in the true sense, to possess the world, and begins to commune with the world in a human way. Before language arose, the world was undivided chaos, and man's experience of the world was but a vague, continuous, unbroken stream of impressions. Primal naming was like a flash of lightning that illuminated the world in an instant and made man's sensuous experience condense and crystallize. Thereupon the world-in-itself became man's world, and man too reflected himself in the world of objects. Linguistic naming occurs within human practice and is the result of practical activity — or rather, it is itself practice. But “naming” is a practice of special significance. Precisely because of the naming of the world, human practice underwent a qualitative leap. For the first time man faced the world with the image, and the world too unfolded before man's eye with a fresh countenance. The relation of man and world changed. Primal naming endowed the world with meaning, and man came to live within this named, meaning-endowed world. Man, language, and world were magically conjoined in this naming process; man, language, and world thereby became intimately and inseparably interrelated.
Because primal naming is the first division of the world and of human experience, it necessarily lies between chaos and clarity, the not-yet-disclosed and the disclosed, the flowing-and-shifting and the congealed-and-fixed; the naming-word too necessarily joins and contains the various features of the mutually repelling poles, and so primal language is the language pregnant with the richest connotation, the language most rich in expression. As Sapir says: “Many primitive languages are rich in form and abundant in expressive potential, enough to make the language of modern civilized man pale by comparison.” [1]
In Gulliver's Travels, Swift sharply satirizes the professors of the language school. To improve their national language, they flatly abolished all the words of the language and conversed by means of physical objects; they carried heavy sacks, like little peddlers, taking out one item after another to lay forth as the instruments of conversation, talking the whole morning. Primitive man is obviously far cleverer than the professors. His language has both object-like concreteness and vividness, with a tendency to “paint sound and image” — that is, to depict, as in a picture, the very thing the speaker wishes to express [2] — without having to bear, like the professors, a heavy sack. In primitive language, the verb too does not express a generalized, abstract act or state, but vividly depicts a concrete action and posture. That is, primitive man does not, from the outset, classify objects in the manner of logical abstraction, but gathers sensuous impressions through naming-activity; the primitive word too is not, like the modern word, tightly bound within the logical system of language and drained of its rich sensuous connotation to become an empty conceptual husk, but is relatively independent and freely loose, with an infinitely rich connotation and a vivid expressive power. “To talk of the quality of things without connecting them to concrete things, to talk of acts or states detached from the concrete person or subject in a given state — such a phenomenon rarely appears in primitive language.” [3]
The concreteness of primal language is partly preserved in classical Chinese as well. The horse, for instance, has many different words denoting its various coat-colors and kinds: in the “Jiong” ode of the “Lu Hymns” of the Book of Songs alone, sixteen names for the horse are mentioned; likewise, in the Shuowen the names for the ox differ according to age, color, and form. These word-concepts recorded in writing are already quite far from primal language, yet compared with modern Chinese their connotation is richer still, and directly linked with concrete, vivid representations. Because language mainly bears the function of a tool of thought and communion, it generally develops according to the principle of economy and efficiency. As the scope of human practice ceaselessly expanded, the power of thought strengthened, and circles of communion widened, language inevitably tended toward abstraction and logicalization, for otherwise it could not meet the needs of a developed thought, communion, and practice. The linguistic sign is “like a ladder: thought ascends the ladder step by step from concrete impressions to the most abstract concepts, to deal with the kind of pure concepts that appear in mathematics.” [4] Only the poetic language of literature strives to resist this ceaseless tendency toward abstraction. Although primal language is linked with the most concrete impressions, yet, because it is an instantaneous division of the world and a first condensation of experience, the edges of its word-concepts are extremely vague; it flows and shifts easily and is wrapped in a mysterious aura — and this accords precisely with the mutual-permeation feature of primitive thinking.
Wittgenstein says: “Naming seems to be a wondrous joining-together of a word and a thing.” [5] Yet for primitive man the wonder primal naming arouses is stronger still. Naming with words made primitive man marvel at the world the word illuminated, marvel at the sound that stirred the very lungs and viscera, marvel at this wondrous joining, and marvel too at the extraordinary linguistic potential issuing from his own union with it, and so further endowed the primally-named word with an extraordinary magic. One may say that every level of the word, and the various connections of world and man, are all condensed beneath the magic of this primal naming and fully revealed. For primitive man, “a name was never something indifferent; it forever demanded a whole series of relations between its possessor and the source from which it came.” [6] The magic of the word is especially conspicuously retained in name-taboos. The North American Indian regarded his name not only as a marker but as a part of himself as important as eye or tooth, believing that malice toward the name could injure the body itself. The Eskimo, in old age, would take a new name to gain new life. The Toraja of Celebes believed that to write down a person's name was to carry off his name and his soul together. That is, once one grasps the name of an object, or gives the object a name, one controls the object by the word. This accords with the legend of the Gauls, who depicted Hercules, the symbol of power, as a tribal elder who chained many men's ears to his tongue with a golden chain and led them along — those men willingly and gladly following the conqueror — the golden chain being the symbol of language; for the Gauls, the power of the body, compared with the power of language, seemed trifling. Among primitive peoples the power of the name reaches even to the gods. In an ancient Egyptian legend the goddess Isis cunningly tricked out the true name of the sun-god Ra, controlled Ra, and became queen of the gods. From this legend Frazer saw: “The true name of a god is inseparably bound up with his divine power, and is almost deeply hidden within the chest of his flesh.” “It is believed that whoever possesses the true name can possess the true substance of a god or a man, and can force him to submit, just as a slave submits to a master.” [7] Name-taboo long persisted in Chinese feudal society. The names of emperors and elders had to be avoided, and even homophones avoided; if in writing one met an identical character, one had to drop a stroke or use a substitute. Even legend says that Chang'e (姮娥) had, on account of the personal name of Emperor Wen of Han (Liu Heng, 恒), to be changed to “Chang'e” (嫦娥); that the mynah (鸲鹆) was renamed “bage” (八哥) because, as the Fuxuan Zalu records, “in the Southern Tang, Li Houzhu's name had to be avoided, so 鸲鹆 was changed to 八哥”; and that a Qing examination essay set the topic “where the people dwell” (维民所止), and because the characters 维 and 止 resemble 雍 and 正 with their tops removed, it was charged with sedition — as if it meant to behead Emperor Yongzheng. Such things, like sorcerous incantations and everyday curses, are the residue of primitive man's primal experience of the magic of language. Therefore Shen Xiaolong says: “Primitive humanity also often took some part of the object it worshipped, or an artificially imitated image of it, as the symbol or vessel of some supernatural spirit; and written words are the most natural and most universally used ‘numinous object.’” [8] Even in the Bible, it is God's word that divided light from darkness and created heaven and earth; and in the Indian Vedas all existence, and even the gods themselves, must submit to the power of the sacred word.
Primal naming tore open for man the chaotic unity of world and self, began man's true communion with the world and his true communion with others and with the self; and so the naming-word necessarily contained man's joy at discovery, his wonder at world and self, his excitement at communion — which painted onto the primal word a thick subjective emotional coloring. The magic of the word spoken of above is likewise inseparable from primitive man's intense emotional experience. Even for modern man, linguistic naming likewise arouses emotion. Thus the naming-word is not only linked with the object but at the same time contains all the perceptual experience and psychic connotation brought by the naming-activity. And in primitive man, primal naming had an added layer of mystery and sacredness. Primitive man lived in this mysterious atmosphere, immersed in the sacred unity of naming-word and object, and poured his whole spiritual force into this unity. Collingwood holds: “Language, in its primal nature, expresses not this narrow-sense thinking (i.e., the intellect — translator's note), but only emotion.” [9] Yet although primal language contains rich emotion and conscious and unconscious content, it is by no means only emotion. Those words that express only emotion are but the secondary part of primal language; they eventually turn into interjections and are not the true headstream of poetic language. More important in primal language is the primal naming-word. These naming-words are emotional, and they gather concrete, vivid sensuous impressions together with subjective experience, possessing a poetic quality by their rich connotation and magical power. Sapir, too, opposes the view that language mainly originates in the domain of emotion. He holds that, from the historical process of language's arising, primal language was at first mainly a “pre-rational” function, a tool used below the conceptual level; it gradually approached thought, and through thought made language refine itself and rise into concept. But this “pre-rational” function is not equivalent to emotion; it has far richer content. “The vast majority of words, like almost all the components of consciousness, carry a certain tone, a thing born of pleasure or pain… yet this tone is generally not the value inherent in the word itself; it is, rather, an emotional excrescence grown out of the conceptual core of the word.” [10] Plainly, Sapir's view on the origin of primal language is the more persuasive; his bias lies in excessively depreciating the place of emotion in language. Emotion in primal language is by no means a worthless excrescence; on the contrary, it is an indispensable, important component of primal language. It is only because of the development of thought and the decline of language into a practical tool that the emotional component came to be regarded as an excrescence. For primitive man, it is precisely because primal language contained intense emotional coloring that it possessed a magical power; and precisely because of the emotional coloring of the word, the named world became meaningful, became humanized nature, a humanized world, and so intimate, like man's home.
For the animal, nature is not its object; it directly belongs to nature; it is unified and harmonious with nature, not separated out from it. Man, by naming with the word, illuminated the primal chaos; the world thereby became man's object-world, and man too thereby separated from the state of undivided unity with nature, becoming an independent existence possessed of subjective consciousness. Naming not only turned the world from chaos to clarity, making communion possible, but the named world became man's humanized world, and at the same time was endowed by man with meaning — which necessarily, at the root, changed the natural relation of man and world. In communing with the world, man on one hand endows the world with meaning, and on the other reflects back, in this communion, man's own meaning for the world. Man began to dwell poetically on the great earth and won a fresh existence. Perhaps it is precisely for this that Cassirer exclaims: “Indeed, it is the word, it is language, that truly reveals to man this world closer to him than any world of natural objects; it is the word, it is language, that more directly than physical nature touches his happiness and his sorrow.” [11]
2. Language Leaves “Home”
Man, by endowing the world with meaning through language, comes to dwell poetically in the world; from this angle, language is man's home. And language is the world of myth. In his treatise Language and Myth, Cassirer very persuasively expounded the relation of language and myth. He holds that, in the primal state of existence, the impressions that move the heart, the desires that stir the feelings, the hopes that tempt thought, the dangers that threaten existence, the powers that shake the soul — all profoundly influenced man, and with a sacred breath were transferred into the object before the individual. This intuitive experience ceaselessly accumulated and condensed; “when, on one side, the whole self pours into a single impression, ‘bewitched’ by it, while on the other side there is a maximal tension between the subject and its object, the external world; when the external world is not merely observed and contemplated but conquers man by sheer directness, filling his whole being with fear, hope, terror, or longing — then, at this very moment, the electric arc pierces the medium, the tension between subject and object is released, and at the same time the subject's excited emotional state is objectified, turning into a god or a demon that appears face to face before the mind's eye.” [12] This is the source of the appearance of gods. Once the sound of language combines with the divine image, this fleeting experience condenses; the god that appears in the primitive man's mind is also set by the medium of language, no longer flowing away. Therefore primal naming is also a process of the condensation of experience; the naming-word too has a divine luster and is joined with myth. “The naming-word must first be conceived, in the manner of myth, as a substantial existence and power, and only then can it be understood as an ideal tool, a principle of the mind's pursuit of knowledge, a basic function in the construction and development of spiritual reality.” [13] Naming-activity is thus inseparably connected with the birth of myth; the magic of the word, too, is manifested and made present in accordance with mythic metaphor. Myth is the home of language.
The development of human practice forces language to decline, by the day, into a tool. To know the world and grasp the world, man must discover the various relations among things and phenomena; and language too is built into a complex logical network. The establishment and strengthening of linguistic logical order makes language ever more convenient for man's thought and communion; the world no longer appears before man's eye as one isolated fragment after another, but as an ordered whole structured by linguistic logic. Through language, man more effectively knows and grasps the world and more effectively carries on communion and thought; language thereby becomes an ever stricter logical system and an efficient tool. Practice, thought, reality, and language thus mutually advance one another. Yet the establishment of the new world-order and the development of human thought inevitably promote the dissolution of primitive thinking and the death of myth, and language thereby loses its mysterious, sacred magic. Language has lost its own “home.”
Language, from the very start, stands in an awkward dilemma. As a tool of thought and communion, it must ceaselessly strengthen its logicality. The strengthening of logical order in fact cancels the magic of the word and cancels the word's independent value. “The value of any element is determined by the elements that surround it.” [14] Logical order is the harm done to the word's rich connotation. The more logic strengthens, the more the word's connotation is emptied, until it becomes a conceptual void, and all its meaning depends wholly on its position and use within the whole. Saussure once divided language into two poles, one weighted toward vocabulary and one toward grammar; at these two extremes the whole linguistic system shifts and changes, like two opposing currents that severally drive the movement of language. That is to say, grammatical logic and the word, though coexisting in the linguistic system, are in fact mutually at odds. Grammar and logic suppress the word and strip the word of its independent value; and the word, to preserve its own independent value and its rich sensuous connotation, must ceaselessly resist the suppression and binding of grammar and logic, so as to gain a relative freedom. For the movement of thought, the erosion of the word's sensuous quality — especially the fading of subjective coloring — is precisely a good thing. For once language sheds the heavy burden of the sensuous and becomes a logical system suspended above reality, it appears the more concise and efficient, the more easily driven at will by thought. One may say that thought, setting out from its own needs, ceaselessly pushes language toward the pole of logicalization, normalization, and systematization; and scientific language is the extreme of logical language. After the death of myth, only poetry remains as the refuge where language guards its sensuous quality. To pursue its own sensuous concreteness, poetry ardently longs to recover the word's thick subjective coloring, its rich sensuous connotation, and its wondrous magic at the moment of primal naming; with strange and unusual arrangements and combinations and with playful variation, it strives to wrest free of the tyrannical fetters of logical order. Poetic language and the logical language that serves as a tool of thought seem to be two poles, mutually opposed and moving in contrary directions; language as a whole stands between these two poles, pulled by both. Although poetic language and the logical language of thought may be regarded as two different linguistic systems, they nonetheless use one and the same set of linguistic signs, and so cannot but mutually interfere.
Language is the product of social history; it has a “collective inertia” that resists innovation. This is “not only because it is bound to the collective's anchor-stone, but because it is situated within time. These two things are inseparable. At any time, having a connecting relation with the past hampers the freedom of choice.” [15] More important still, the deep structure latent beneath discourse has a super-stability; it always, unbeknownst to us, controls discourse and regulates discourse. This stability, this conservatism of language, makes it wear away day by day and lose vitality in ceaseless repeated use. On the other hand, the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, the artificial relation between sound-material and concept, and especially the changes of social life, all cause language to develop and change. New things appearing in social life — new institutions, new trends of thought, new notions, new tools, new fashions, or new discoveries and new ways of thinking — must all find expression in language, causing changes in the vocabulary and modes of expression of language. “In this sense, language (any living language) is unstable, because it changes month by month and year by year.” [16] The change of language endows it with unceasing vitality. These vital everyday languages are close to the sensuous features of poetic language; they are ceaselessly absorbed by poetic language and enrich poetic language. Yet everyday language, after all, mainly serves practical, utilitarian aims, and the utilitarian aim is overriding. It always, by the principle of timely efficiency, strips language of its autonomy, its ambiguity, and its richness — that is, its poetic quality — confining it to the status of a tool. This necessarily leads most everyday language to lack poetic feeling.
What harms language most is “bureaucratic language.” The patterning, hierarchicalization, and hollow ossification of bureaucratic language most severely wear and corrode language. It copies a thousand pieces from one mold and forcibly imposes a set pattern, not only draining the vitality of the word but maiming language as a whole.
Once it leaves the home of myth, language declines into a double tool. On one hand, it becomes man's tool for knowing and grasping the world. Man no longer directly faces the world, but communes with the world through language. Language divides the world in its own peculiar way, and man, through the lens of language, knows and grasps the world by language's way of dividing it. As Schaff says: “In fact, the ‘real world’ is, to a great degree, unconsciously built upon the language-habits of the human collective.” [17] Language becomes the unavoidable, unconsciously-perceived intermediary that links man with the world. While serving man, it also brings its own limitation to man and forcibly imposes its own prejudice upon man. The originally rich and varied connections between man and world come to be confined within the framework of language, becoming a monotonous, fixed relation. The bounds of language become the bounds of the humanized world. Especially after language has lost its sensuous richness, the world that is displayed through this lens is dyed a gray hue: the stone is no longer the stone, but only a conceptual husk. While giving man convenience, the language-tool also helps lengthen the automatization and dulling of perception.
On the other hand, language becomes a tool by which social-historical culture enslaves man. Language is the extremely effective channel for transmitting cultural tradition, the sediment in which social-historical culture is accumulated. Once formed, “not only can the individual not change it in the slightest even if he wishes, but the masses too cannot exercise their sovereignty over any single word; whatever language may be like, the masses are all bound together with it.” [18] Social-historical culture, to a great degree, strengthens its authority over man precisely through the language that is bound up with man. Roland Barthes puts it even more arrestingly: “In the long history of man's existence, what is lodged in power is language, or, more precisely, the indispensable part of language: the language-structure (la langue).” “Language (langage) is a kind of legislation, and the language-structure is a kind of code. We cannot see the power that exists within the language-structure, because we have forgotten that the whole language-structure is a classifying phenomenon, and all classification is coercive: order means both apportioning and threatening.” In Barthes' view, power is not only a political phenomenon but also an ideological one; it penetrates every domain — class, group, school, public opinion, family, and private relations — and especially lodges covertly within language. It forces man to speak according to the established structural way, forcing and limiting him to make classifications and choices. The fixed authoritativeness and weighty collectivity that language possesses make it downright “fascist.” [19]
As a double tool, language loses its independent value and loses its wondrous power. Language in fact no longer truly connects man with man, man with world, so as to let the infinitely rich relations of man with man and man with world fully unfold; it becomes, instead, a network suspended on the surface of man and world. Man and world are separated, and each is cut up by the network and fixed by the network. Man, world, and language all decline into slaves. Language has left its home, and the poetic quality of language has withered. Thereupon man too has lost his spiritual home; man no longer dwells poetically upon the great earth.
3. The Eden of Poetry
Man cannot live in a spiritual desert; man must create meaning for himself, create poetic feeling for existence. Man pins deep hope on the poet, for only poetry, by resisting enslavement, still lingers in the Eden of language. “The poet names the gods, and again names the many things that originally exist. Rather than say this naming is to give a name to things we already knew, it is better to say that, when the poet speaks an essential word, existence is by this naming called to be itself, and thereupon is taken as existence and so understood. Poetry, through the word, establishes ‘existence.’” [20] Yet language, having left the world of myth, has already lost its magic and can never return to the state of primal naming. The poet can only abandon the names originally inherent in things and, by renaming the world, endow existence with new meaning and divinity.
Poetry first liberates language through virtualization. In the virtual realm, the logical relation of signifier and signified, of linguistic sign and object, is dissolved; the fixed grammatical structure too loses its usual authority. Language and word regain their freedom; man, language, and world are once more in a seemingly playful, flowing relation. Virtualization means that signifier and signified, word-sign and object, word and word, even man and world, can freely establish all manner of new relations, thereby providing the condition for the poet's naming-activity and the possibility of fully tapping the latent power of language.
At the same time, poetry is relatively “conventionalized,” for “a poem can only be composed of other poems.” [21] “A poem takes reading-conventions as its premise. The poet may write with reference to these conventions; he may contrive to alter them; yet these conventions are the very condition by which his discourse can possibly exist.” [22] This “convention” is not a congealed, dead pattern, but the linguistic physiognomy jointly established by the phonetic, semantic, pragmatic, grammatical, and overall structural and stylistic features peculiar to poetry. It is precisely this convention, this linguistic physiognomy, that arouses the reader's expectation, hints to the reader to establish a specific intentional relation with the text, and to view the world in poetry's unique way. From this angle, the conventionalization of poetry leads to the separation of poetic language from everyday language and makes poetic language an independent system. Yet conventionalization itself contains a factor of self-negation. Although poetic conventions are ceaselessly created, once poetic language is confined within an independent system, it will inevitably, under the wear of cyclic use, shed its luster, become habitualized, and finally lose poetic feeling.
The poet then resists the wear and habitualization of language by renaming the world. “Defamiliarization” is one of the ways of naming. “The aim of poetry is to overturn the process of habitualization, to ‘defamiliarize’ the things so familiar to us, to ‘creatively damage’ the habitual and standard, so as to pour into us a new, childlike, vital foreground.” For Russian Formalism, defamiliarization is mainly a violation of everyday language, a distortion of everyday language. But in poetic practice, defamiliarization in fact occurs on two levels: one is the defamiliarization of everyday language — using the rhythms and conventions of poetry rather than of everyday language to summon the reader to view the poem with an aesthetic attitude; the other is the defamiliarization of poetic language itself — to ceaselessly renew poetic language, inject new vitality into it, and prevent its aging and decline. It should be said that the latter defamiliarization is especially important. The violation of everyday language merely arouses a poetic attitude, whereas the violation of poetic language itself truly breaks the aesthetic habit, makes language shine with poetic light, and thereby creates a wholly new, poetically-suffused world.
Because defamiliarization is at the same time a violation of poetic language itself, it tends to develop in two directions: either to seek the “wondrously steep,” the “perilous,” or to seek the “vulgar,” the “plain.” The wondrously steep and the perilous, of course, break a fresh path and win by surprise; while vulgar and plain words, once they enter the poetic-language system, likewise show, against the overall background of poetic language, the effect of defamiliarization. The Chinese poetic tradition especially esteems the realm of plain language and an ingenious yet seemingly artless workmanship, of wresting the natural from amid the plain, without trace of chisel or seam — and so attaining a self-coincidence. Thus, when Liu Xizai's Yigai (the “Outline of Poetry”) regards “ordinary words being easy and strange words hard” as “the first pass of poetry,” and “strange words being easy and ordinary words hard” as “the further pass of poetry,” and when Wei Qingzhi, commenting on Du Fu's poems, says, “to count things with ‘ge,’ to call eating ‘chi,’ is quite close to the vulgar — yet Du Fu alone used it well,” [23] and when Qian Yong likewise says, “spoken everyday words can all enter poetry; used in tune, they become fine lines,” [24] — poetic language, as a unique system contrasted with everyday language, has vulgar spoken words enter the poetic system not so as to change the whole relation of the poetic system to everyday language, but so as to enrich poetic language and, under the setting-off of the poetic system, to show strangeness, novelty, and vividness. The tension formed between such language and the poetic language fills poetry with vitality and rich import.
Creative defamiliarization is a violation of the whole convention composed of existing phonetics, semantics, pragmatics, and style. This overall violation lets the novel features of every level of poetry be fully developed and displayed. Language sheds its habitual, ossified pattern and its conceptual hollowness, is rescued, and finally revives. The rich sensuous connotation and the magic of primal naming flash once more in defamiliarization.
Cassirer holds that primal language and myth are, in essence, metaphorical. There, metaphor is not a dry “substitution,” a mere rhetorical device; language too is not merely hinting at a sensuous world, but is directly identical with the sensuous world, a thing that strikes man's mind as hard reality; and the dictionary is then what Herder called the “sounding pantheon.” Because poetic defamiliarization restores language's sensuous richness, it is necessarily metaphorical; what it gives man is not merely a novel linguistic form, but, more importantly, a newly opened sensuous world. As Richards says, poetry “is an intermediary of intuitive language; it can substantially transmit feeling. It always strives to attract you and makes you ceaselessly see a material thing, preventing you from sliding into an abstract process. It chooses fresh description and fresh metaphor, not because we are tired of the old, but because the old words can no longer transmit material things and have already become an abstract obstacle.” [25] Dufrenne further points out: “The language of the work itself should not, like masturbation, gain satisfaction from itself; the work must more or less refer to the world, even if in order to negate the world or to take the world as an imagined background. A whole is meaningful only when it states an intended meaning, aims at a referent external to the sign and named first by the sign: to describe, one must first name. The described meaning points toward the named object.” [26] Yet the dissolution of primitive thinking decided that poetic metaphor cannot become primal mythic metaphor; it can only construct the world, create the world, within the aesthetic intention, and cannot let itself be directly identical with the real world. Yet this aesthetic world is, after all, the channel by which man communes with the world; and because it has shed the heavy burden of reality and the fetters of spirit, the aesthetic world becomes a freer world. And because the aesthetic world is a world freely constructed by man, it is precisely here that man's authentic existence and man's meaning are most fully seen. Poetry builds a bridge of free spirit between man and world; poetry begins anew the dialogue of man with his own authentic existence.
Poetic language is built on the basis of a language-paradox. Defamiliarization destroys grammatical habit and makes grammatical rules verge on dissolution; defamiliarization abandons the practical aim of language and mocks the principle of language's effectiveness, thereby making language a self-sufficient language no longer in the service of communion. And the independent autonomy of language precisely most fully liberates language and fully displays its sensuous quality. Therefore man is not only in dialogue with poetry and with the word, but at the same time in dialogue with the sensuous world, with the self, with the existence of man; and so self-sufficient poetic language becomes the most expressive, most affecting language, the language that realizes a communion of essential significance between man and man, between man and world.
But defamiliarization is, after all, finite. Strangeness takes the normal as its reference. Even if it resists linguistic logic, it cannot escape the shadow of linguistic logic. Defamiliarization cannot return to the linguistic state of primal naming, cannot be identical with the real. Thereupon poetry names by “silence.” This is the beauty of the wordless, the blank — what Liu Xie called the “hidden splendor” (隐秀) of “secret echoes and mutual evocation” (秘响旁通), “the deep pattern hidden and luxuriant, the lingering flavor wrapped about indirectly.” Blankness is not nothing at all, but a dialogue of being and nothing. Laozi says: “Thirty spokes share one hub; in their nothingness lies the cart's usefulness. Knead clay to make a vessel; in its nothingness lies the vessel's usefulness. Cut out doors and windows to make a room; in its nothingness lies the room's usefulness.” [27] The “usefulness of the cart,” “of the vessel,” “of the room,” all arise from the mutual generation of being and nothing. “Speech” arouses the reader; “blankness,” “silence,” then summons the reader, inviting the reader to immerse himself in the blank that silence leaves, and further to “demand being from nothingness, to seek sound from the silent,” to take in the myriad realms and directly intermingle with the myriad things of the cosmos. For the inner world and the outer world that man has never named or cannot name, poetry names by silence, by blankness. Blankness is the interval between words, the vacant position outside words; it is, after all, created by the tension of poetic language itself and depends on the reader's participation to speak indirectly. It is not non-speech, but a graceful, hidden speech that lures the reader to speak. This is what Bai Juyi called “the seen that cannot be spoken as seen,” “the heard that cannot be spoken as heard,” “the distant that cannot be spoken as distant,” “the still that cannot be spoken as still,” “the bitter that cannot be spoken as bitter,” “the joyful that cannot be spoken as joyful,” “the hateful that cannot be spoken as hate,” [28] that is, what Xin Qiji called “wishing to speak, yet stopping.”
Nature and human experience are originally an undivided whole, flowing and shifting; it is language that forcibly imposes classification and division upon nature and experience and fixes them; only primal naming connects the undivided unity and the flow. Poetic blankness then, by silence, by wordless naming, approaches the undivided flow of nature and experience and transmits the music of heaven, the sound of heaven. August Wilhelm Schlegel holds that “beauty is the symbolic manifestation of the infinite.” The infinite of which he speaks refers to “the mystery behind appearances and the mystery within ourselves; it is a cosmic, hidden thing, ‘a soul-revealing verdict — that is, a profound intuitive cognition, our very existence seemingly cut open and dissolved by it.’” [29] Poetry precisely contains the infinite by blankness and displays, by wordless naming, the mystery of the cosmos and of man himself. It evokes and hints, yet does not directly speak; it is silent, and in silence hides nameless emotion and mysterious import; it sets a blank, yet sets no boundary, and here is hidden an immensely vast physical time-space and psychological time-space. Thereupon, when man immerses himself in the blank of poetry, he apprehends the infinity and mystery of the cosmos and of himself. If defamiliarization abandons ready-made, habitual naming-speech and, by a way different from before, taps and displays the latent power of language, then “blankness,” by way of “silence,” circumvents the limitation of language. Language's conceptual determinacy, language's finitude, language's division of the world — all no longer exist in the wordless blank. By its finite speech it arouses in the reader a fervent longing for mysterious nature and for the existence of man, luring the reader to seek and savor outside speech. Here, the separation of language vanishes, and man directly faces and communes with nature, with existence. “What is there in the mountains? On the ridges, much white cloud. Fit only for my own delight; not to be held out and presented to you.” Poetic blankness is the speech of “what cannot be spoken”; it does not “present to you” the finite object with determinate language, but leaves a linguistic blank, inviting one to delight in oneself amid the very clouds and ridges, and thereby to enter the experience of the undivided, infinite, flowing, shifting — not set, not divided, by language. Plainly, poetic blankness manifests the “existence” of the unnamable speech, and not the “existent” of the namable speech. It is precisely in the blank that life is truly in eternal movement, free creation, infinite unfolding. This is a stretch of poetic open ground, within which man gains his authentic existence. Poetic blankness, in the dialectical unity of speech and non-speech, pushes poetic language to its extreme.
“The language of poetry draws all its power and truth only from its strangeness and transcendence.” [30] It departs from norms, and thereby ceaselessly creates new conventions; it speaks by silence, and silence yet contains endless import; it scorns communion, and so truly connects man with world, man with self; it concentrates on its own independent value, yet in fact endows man's existence with meaning, creating for man a wholly new dimension of existence to roam in. In short, poetry, by way of defamiliarization, names the world rendered lightless by familiarity; by wordless blankness, names the chaotic, infinite, and unknown world. Poetry, seeking the renaming of the world, returns to the age of primal myth, and with a wondrous magic creates a misty, primordial atmosphere. Poetry is the renaming of the world.
Yet, just as one cannot step twice into the same river, poetry's effort to return to primal naming is but a memory of a remote, savage age, a beautiful dream that cannot be reenacted. But the poet still, ceaselessly and without rest, pursues this memory and seeks this dreamland.