A Web of Chaos: Bialik and Nietzsche on Language, Truth, and the Death of God

Bialik's important essay on language, "Revelation and Concealment in Language," is largely a reworking of Nietzsche's early essay "On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense." Bialik follows Nietzsche in his discussion of the origin of language and the resulting critique of the concept of linguistic truth, and further in the notion that the underlying reality of the world is chaos. This last idea is presented both discursively and poetically, through a series of formulas in which chaos takes the place traditionally held by God. Bialik uses these ideas to develop a theory of poetic production that emphasizes the poet's ability not to avert his gaze from the chaos but rather to use it as a means of recapturing, even if only in a limited way, the primordial force of Adamic linguistic creation.