Words as Cries: Blanchot, Valery, Wittgenstein

Maurice Blanchot quotes Valery thus:  “poetry is the attempt to [..]restore, by means of articulated language, those things or that thing, which cries, tears, caresses, kisses, and so on obscurely try to express.”

Poetry aspires not to music but to the condition of crying or kissing. Perhaps another way of saying this is that poetry aspires not to represent feelings but to manifest and amplify them in the same way that a cry or a kiss does.  A cry or kiss does not simply express a pre-existing affect, it is directly that affect. A cry continues and transforms the pain which it “expresses”, and poetry then gives further definition and depth to this cry. 

This is perhaps a profane juxtaposition, but there is something related in Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein suggests that even apparently descriptive phrases are modes of, for example, crying or moaning:  "A cry is not a description [.. ] And the words “I am afraid” may approximate more, or less, to being a cry." And: 

I have a toothache” is no more the description of behaviour than moaning is. To call it a description is misleading in a discussion like this […] of course, “toothache” is not only a substitute for moaning. But it is also a substitute for moaning. 

 If we agree with Wittgenstein, then poetry is not, in this respect, radically different from the language of everyday life. It is kind of refinement of it. It finds new ways of moaning, crying, raging. It allows our cries and moans to breath and expand in different ways. It uses, for Valery, the articulate as a route back into depths of the pre-articulate. 

Perhaps both Valery and Wittgenstein are examples of Modern attempts to restore to language some of its materiality and executive force. That is, to view words as things which - rather than reporting on what they express -  partake in what they “express” (by way of emanation, for example), which are also actions/ are more like actions. 

I'd like to expand on this in the next post.