A Philosophy of the Unsayable: Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge

Chapter One: Invitatory

P a r t I P h i l o s o P h y A n d l i t e r A t U r e 13 C h a p t e r O n e inv itAtory Varieties and Valences of Unsayability in Literature Ce qui n’est pas ineffable n’a aucune importance. (That which is not ineffable has no importance.) —Paul Valéry, Mon Faust Paul Valéry’s famous statement concerning the paramount, indeed the unique importance of the ineffable receives an unlikely and unwitting confirmation from the character of bottom the Weaver in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “I have had a most rare vision. I have had a dream—past the wit of man to say what dream it was.—Man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream. Methought I was—there is no man can tell what. Methought I was, and methought I had,—but man is but a patched fool, if he will offer to say what methought I had. The eye of man hath not heard, the ear of man hath not seen; man’s hand is not able to taste, his tongue to conceive, nor his heart to report what my dream was.” (Midsummer Night’s Dream, Act IV, scene i) As is typical of those who speak about what cannot be said, bottom cannot keep it short. He stammers on. He says over and over again . . . what 14 P H I L O S O P H y A N D L I T E R A T U R E he cannot say. Since he cannot really say what he feels compelled to try and say, he keeps on trying. In so doing, he reflects indirectly on what fascinates him by reflecting directly on his own incapacities and foolishness, as brought out by the experience of being checked in his attempt to express what he cannot. There is endlessly much to say about this experience of inadequacy vis-à-vis the unsayable and miraculous, and precisely this verbiage constitutes perhaps its only possible expression. bottom speaks from the bottom end of what can also be the most elevated of all discursive modes—as Longinus appreciated and as can be illustrated by contrasting bottom’s comic voice and its ludicrous malapropisms with Valéry’s rather superb, perhaps even supercilious, tone. Nevertheless, bottom’s words are indicative of an important direction in the drift across the centuries of discourse on what cannot be said. This drifting is precisely what severe moralists, such as Augustine and Wittgenstein, have wished to put a stop to by enjoining silence. While in principle the Unsayable would seem to demand silence as the only appropriate response, in practice endless discourses are engendered by this ostensibly most forbidding and unapproachable of topics. This predicament of prolix speechlessness is found over and over again in literature of all kinds, especially at its dramatic climaxes of revelatory disclosure or “epiphany.” Another especially poignant instance in familiar literature of how precisely the issue of the unsayable, the nameless, emerges eloquently as the secret key to all meaning and mystery is Ishmael ’s consternation vis-à-vis the whiteness of the White Whale in Moby Dick. This color, or rather “visible absence of color,” speaks by its very unspeakability : it is “a dumb blankness, full of meaning,” says Ishmael, “and yet so mystical and well-nigh ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me. but how can I hope to explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else all these chapters might be naught.”1 The terror of the Unnameable expressed in these lines suggests another register, besides those of bottom and Valéry, of the limitless range of tones resorted to by speakers face to face with what cannot be said. It is a register familiar also from Kurtz’s last words—the exclamation “The horror ! The horror!”—as narrated by Marlow in Heart of Darkness. Conrad’s Invitatory 15 novel is a further example of a fiction hovering obsessively around something unsayable as its generating source, something that the narrator despairs of being able to retell: “It seems to...