Literary Theory Today

A New Line a New Mind : Language & the Original World

也A NEW LINE A NEW MIND: LANGUAGE AND THE 0技 IGINAL WORLD Wai蟬lim Yip Consider, for a second, the fol1owing components of a given moment in a concrete environment: (前笠豆豆凹， (a) 山皆是，豆主任笠 )0鴨person-around酬-consider these given facts, iι，性f史岱 the perceiving subject notices or perhaps later decides the location of the house as it is related to the stream (by the stream? above the stream? overlooking the stream? etc.), before he marks the si1ence (of the general surrounding) as寸trises out of the possibly ooz1峙， trick1ing or even 惡urgling stream, and Q竺些墜地 is aware of the absence (of people) by way of hiS IOI"lE! presence (the affirmation of "no-one-around" demands the perceiver's presence), of the ambience which d哲nands hls immedlate withdrawal from the scene to leave the absence true to its nature, to allow the negativíty of presence to take on its wider significance. As we can see, the prepredicative moment belor吉思s to the origin祉， real wor1d, beyond human touch, beyond conception and beyond language; the predicative ~cts belong to the mediatin在 subject. Predication, that 話， the articulation of determinable relationships between or among emerging objects, inc1uding all post-reflective acts initiated by the existential components during or after the immediate contact, and indeed, thinking itself, is, as Hegel has argued, ~. form of negation of that which is immediately before us. The imminent question is, then, this: is it possible to have a line of poetic expression in which the prepredicative 忍ivenness remains uncontaminated? For example, can we simply give it, in English, as'such: 史笠豆豆坦白豆豆投旦旦旦 笠豆豆， without fee1ing guilty: that is, gui1ty of having violated some essential law of the English language? And yet, if there is another language which can 皂ive it simply as such, as in Chinese，潤戶竄無人， what are we to understand from this phenom.enon? What kind of philosophical or aesthetic position does this fact point to or evolve from? Why giving it out as such in Eng1ish would 162 evoke a sense of abnorma1ity, even if we bend backwards to accept it as possib1e? These are aesthetic questions, but they are a1so phi1osophica1 and historica1 ones. Wi11iam Car10s Wi11iams once said, unless there is a new mind there cannot be a new 1ine Putting it against the perspective out1ined abóve, the statement cou1d be rephrased into severa1 significant interre1ated questions centra1 to modern phi1osophy and poetlcs: 1. Can an original moment of the presencing of the rea1 wor1d come to disc10se itse1f authentica11y before us through language without being pressed into some form of Procrustean bed: syntax, rhetoric, 1inguistic codes etc. ? 2. 15 origina1ity at a11 possible, if, by origina1ity, we mean a phrase or a 1ine that is total1y free from the restraints of 1anguage which, being histori4Pl by nature, usual1y operates by herding aU 1ived and varied experience into the so-ca11ed proper folds, c1earcut, c1ean, orderly, reduced? 3. Indeed, the 1imits of language being such, can we rea11y see the world "with an ignorant eye," as Wa11ace Stevens aspires to? The Orphic be1ief that language can ca11 the world into being, and Mallarmé's conviction that language is a magic wand that can make an object disappear, leaving itse1f tremb1ing in communion with tota1ity in the pristine world of nothingness are processes of attempted extensions of language potentials by sheer force of mystification. While these views could have once been possible and even rea1izable, such as in the primitive men's marve110us 。riginal contact and communication with the animal and plant worlds, language as we now use it, poetical or otherwise, often be1ies these grand conceptions. Language ......---一 163 is a prison岫house， constantly coding, decoding and recodin皂， at once closed as a system (as the structura1ists want to see it) and豆豆豆， i.e. historical and temporal, changing and growing with over1aying significations, forming a net of interweaving and yet restrictive perceptual modes, from which any poet who is determined to a ttain origina1ity must extricate himse1f. The prison-house of langua惡e is joined with that of thought. For a new line of poetic expression to assert its independent presence, a poet has to, first and foremost, recover the original ground, where we find the given as given, by liberatin在 himself from the accustomed house of thought so as to move into a new house of Being. Here, Heidegger's warning is to be noted: that t~~._…aJ泣~CI wru:ld that is...