1/100 - when language runs out

The week before last, I found myself in a hotel room with Ted Hughes. Obviously this is both less libellous and exciting than it sounds. It had been a busy few days, I’d slept in five different beds in just over a week, I declined tacos in favour of an early night, a cup of herbal tea and a copy of Hughes’ Winter Pollen. This collection of collected prose, largely criticism, has aged. I don’t want to say badly, but that it simply has aged. A critic is tied to their era and much of the scope of the enquiry of this collection centres around work published in the 1960s. The most interesting essays are where Hughes writes either about poetry, his own approach or those of others. Always the strength and agility of his mind is present on the page, here’s a writer for whom the external holds more interest than the internal, he sees out instead of in. Perhaps the key thing to be learnt from criticism of this period is that the first person I rarely makes an appearance on the page - the critic’s role is not to say whether or not they like the work in question but whether the work succeeds or fails on its own terms. There is now too little of this strict enquiry left, in part due to time constraints, packed publishing schedules and the gamification of reading, promoted in no small part by Goodreads and book blogging, which although useful commercially, is an entirely different approach to that of a critic. Often the introduction of the I and the preference implicit in the choice, betrays a lack of contextual and theoretical knowledge. Simply reducing a book to an I liked this because or I did not like this because, reduces reading to an act of preference instead of one of enquiry, diligence and rigour. When reading is simply equated to pleasure or displeasure, books run the risk of only existing to entertain, which leads us into difficult territory. A book review is not synonymous with criticism. What Hughes reminds us in this collection is that criticism stands alone as its own art, one in danger of dying with few noticing its passing.

That evening, I read the essay National Ghost, in which Hughes reviews the book Men Who March Away: Poems of the First World War. The title of the essay evokes Jeremy Deller’s 2016, mobile installation, We’re Here Because We’re Here, in which actors dressed in uniforms of soldiers from WW1. On the centenary of the Battle of the Somme, they went out across the UK, instructed to talk to no one, instead handing over cards with the name of a dead soldier, their birth and death dates, battalion and regiment. Through not speaking these actors became evocations not enactments, creating a type of national ghost for the day. The key here is the lack of language. At times, we move beyond language, the ghost itself enough of a presence to convey all that’s needed. Other times though, we exist at the threshold of what language can do. As a complex system of substitutes and signifiers, language by its nature only ever contains a lack; it is at best a faulty medium but largely we ignore this in the belief it does what we need it to do. It is in times of extremis that this lack shows itself, as Hughes notes in National Ghost, when he writes, But on the whole, apart from Owen and Sassoon, the poets lost that war. Perhaps Georgian language would not look so bad if it hadn’t been put to such a test. It was the worst equipment they could possibly have had - the language of the state of mind that belied and concealed the possibility of the nightmare that now had to be expressed.

Since I read that, I can’t stop thinking of it. It relates directly to a review I read once of Max Ritvo’s posthumously published Four Reincarnations. I think the review was in the LA Review of Books, but I could be wrong, I have this extract written in a notebook in my study, everything goes away, sooner or later; poetry exists in part because the language of prose, the language of verifiable propositions and confirmable requests, cannot fit all the wishes we harbour inside ourselves, or in spite of ourselves. And I think this, combined with Hughes’ belief that a specific type of linguistic conditioning rendered the majority of the war poets unable to express the horrors of what they needed to express, expresses how the language of verifiable propositions and confirmable requests falls down now. How are the horrors of war and injustice to be expressed, how is the difficultly of understanding the complexity of the world we find ourselves in to be expressed? What language exists to communicate these? I am not sure if it is either the language of poetry or prose or reportage or the medium of film or paint or TV. I wonder if any language could express this. Certainly, in translation it would fall short. I feel we exist at a critical artistic juncture, I think now of Guston, unable to paint figuratively after WW2. I wonder what we make next as we try to make something from an already insufficient vehicle; I wonder what comes next.