Language as Silence

A look at some quotations by the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty

To speak is not to put a word under each thought; if it were, nothing would ever be said. Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

As a writer and lover of language, I want to say a few things about a philosopher who has helped me think much more deeply about what language is and how it functions. One of his essays on painting and language, “Indirect Language and the Voices of Silence,”* has been particularly helpful, and I’ve made extensive use of its concepts in the way I approach Hemingway’s striking, “painterly” way of writing. Merleau-Ponty’s thinking is grounded in the idea of the quote above, where he makes a distinction between “thought” and “words,” or what he also refers to as “meaning” and “language.” The fundamental concept at play here is one most of us likely don’t ordinarily entertain, and we may well even think, “of course my words are the extensions of my thoughts. How can I even think or have thoughts without words?” But for Merleau-Ponty, it is critical to make this distinction, to consider words as tools we use to help harness and express our thoughts, even as we insist that our thoughts extend well beyond them somehow. He continues: 

As far as language is concerned, it is the lateral relation of one sign to another which makes each of them significant, so that meaning appears only at the intersection of and as it were in the interval between words…Like a charade, language is understood only through the interaction of signs, each of which, taken separately, is equivocal or banal, and makes sense only by being combined with others…Because meaning is the total movement of speech, our thought crawls along in language.

As with all good philosophy, reading this both brings clarity even as it takes us to other levels of consideration, complication (confusion). Essential for me is the continued insistence that language and meaning are separate things, and I love his reliance on metaphor and simile here to reach toward this nuanced abstraction. That meaning occurs at the “interval between words” makes more sense, perhaps, when considering literary texts, especially poetry. But he insists that all language functions like this all the time, that it “crawls along” behind thought/meaning, that it coerces and teases meaning out into the open only through a steady volley of words that somehow manage to jostle meaning into being in those “intervals” between them. 

Language bears the meaning of thought as a footprint signifies the movement and effort of a body…Like the weaver, the writer works on the wrong side of his material. He has to do only with language, and it is thus that he suddenly finds himself surrounded by meaning.

More metaphors. The first is especially compelling. Language as the footprint of thought suggests something doubly removed. The thing that makes the footprint is gone, but it leaves its mark in the words set down, imprinted, as a means to suggest the thing that was once there. The weaving metaphor introduces still more complexities and nuance to the mystery of how words evoke meaning, how thought, in turn, evokes words. These words I’m setting down now are not the thing itself, not the full expression, not the complete meaning. They are, in fact, on the entire “other side” of that thing, that tapestry, that thought. I also love the near-accidental feel of it all, that one “suddenly finds himself surrounded by meaning” after stitching together words, reaching toward that meaning.

But what if language expresses as much by what is between words as by the words themselves? By that which it does not "say"as by what it “says”?…Now if we rid our minds of the idea that our language is the translation or cipher of an original text, we shall see that the idea of complete expression is nonsensical, and that all language is indirect or allusive—that it is, if you wish, silence.

That everything builds toward this seemingly contradictory idea—“Language is silence”—has a wonderful power to it, is jarring to the core. And, if you know Hemingway at all with his pared down sentences and what he called “all the scrollwork of language” stripped away, you can start to see why Merleau-Ponty’s thinking is so useful there. More broadly, I love how these concepts help me reconsider my efforts to “say things” (write things) that have “meaning” with words. To think of my words as mere indentations left by the force and weight of a thought or as the knots and unfinished thread-work on the “wrong” side of a tapestry bring a certain kind of freedom. Getting every word just right doesn’t matter in the same way I once thought it did, since there is no “right” word that ever correlates directly with the idea I’m scribbling my way toward. When one is done reading something I’ve written, ideally the words fade away, and one is struck by the far more immense and significant force of the thought, the meaning itself. Even as it is freeing to think this way, it is also daunting and challenging. Each knot tied on the wrong side of that tapestry needs to lead the reader to something they can experience “on the right side” that is worthwhile and gratifying….

Merleau-Ponty’s words also help me better understand my never-ending frustration with the demands of English teachers, first as a student of them, later as one myself. Inherent to most writing instruction runs something directly counter to Merleau-Ponty’s arguments about the intersection of language and thought. Especially problematic is the insistence by many an English teacher that students decide on a thesis and make a “thesis statement” early on in the writing process. “But, teacher, since language is fundamentally indirect and allusive and silent itself, won’t I need to play with it, shuffle and re-shuffle my words, always attentive to what meaning might well have caused those words to well up in my mind in the first place, a meaning I’m hopeful I will, eventually, find myself suddenly surrounded by, knowing the words themselves can never fully equal the thought that crawls along just out of reach?” 

*PDFs of this essay can easily be found online.

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