The fourth page of my copy of Mrs Dalloway is crowded with markings. My English teacher recommended studying it that way. Littered through the margins are references to simultanism and stream of consciousness and tricolon crescendos, and the abstract musings of a mind alight. Laying eyes upon the page now, I realise how little I understood, but recall the elation I felt at reading it.

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In that class, my teacher would begin by instructing us to push all the tables together. Then we would sit, and she would read passages from the book:

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‘In people’s eyes, in the swing, tramp, and trudge; in the bellow and the uproar; the carriages, motor cars, omnibuses, vans, sandwich men shuffling and swinging; brass bands; barrel organs; in the triumph and the jingle and the strange high singing of some aeroplane overhead was what she loved; life; London; this moment of June.’

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‘What do we notice?’ my teacher would probe. My reply was hopelessly unsatisfying. Madly clutching at available words, I would speak of the vitality of the scene, the life of all the images, desperate to communicate just what it was that leapt up in me at beholding the ecstasy of a summer in London, and its complete expression. Like a familiar face in a crowd, this ecstasy, articulated through the layered images of a city I had never seen, was at once recognised. This scene was a portrait of total synchronicity, and the breath of life it gives us when all parts sing to the same pulse. What a thing to try and say.

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That Virginia Woolf’s words could relay such an ecstasy was a flare of hope to me. That I might recognise such a feeling, a century later, on the other side of the world, was hope greater still. Now between Woolf and me, and my English teacher whose sighs revealed her equal elation, there was a oneness, an understanding. There was a common recognition of something familiar, and the realisation that this familiar feeling is familiar to someone else. This is the torchlight provided by words: in the gaping darkness of our endless and unknowable selves, words lay bare a feeling for someone else to recognise. Words make precise what seems boundless. Words make intimate what might remain isolated.

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And yet so often, words fail us.

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~

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There is a road that runs through Sydney’s west that I absolutely loathe. Powerlines hang heavily overhead, car sale yards clutter the pavements, glaring colours clash on ads for furniture stores and vacuum cleaner shops, and there is always traffic. The footpaths are dirty. The signs crack and peel. There are too many cars. Every shop sells products that blare on about all the worst parts of life. It’s too loud, and there are no trees, no harmony, no beauty.

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I remember being little, sitting in the passenger seat and hating it, and not knowing how to say why. There was no one thing I hated – it was the whole atmosphere and the collective ugliness and how repulsed and unhappy it made me. When there is no word to pin down a feeling, it expands. People misunderstand. Explanations frustrate. Tears ensue.

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The word ‘vibe’ would have been helpful here. I often could have used that word. Describing people and places to the extent that I understood them was difficult without it; social dynamics, atmospheres and music were near impossible. I was glad when ‘vibe’ and ‘aura’ and ‘energy’ grew more popular in our collective vocabulary. They are a good shorthand. They still seem lazy words to me – they are imprecise and overused and undefined. But they do the job.

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Many tears and tantrums would be quelled with the right word. For little me, there was no greater frustration than sensing something that lay in the territory beyond words. I wanted to describe the appalling energy of that road and the real desolation caused by a neglect of beauty. I wanted to articulate the heroism and the pathos that played out between my toy animals on the carpet; or the tranquillity of quiet meals with kind parents; or the panic of sacred moments passing with time. I just didn’t have the words. The limits of my language felt so solid when I bumped into them. Tears and tantrums were a railing against the borders drawn out by vocabulary.

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My grandpa tells me about when he arrived as a young Dutch immigrant in Australia, and was no less than crippled by his lack of language. He describes the isolation, the dehumanisation, of seeing a pretty flower and not being able to point at it and say, ‘Isn’t that a pretty flower!’ It was even worse when it was a pretty girl.  

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I don’t believe it is overdramatic to say that such a thing is true entrapment. Without language, there is just no way out of yourself. There is no way in either, no way of making yourself known in a way that might actually be knowable to others. Expression of our innermost selves is the only path to intimacy – the bridge between two minds. The inability to say what we mean not only stirs up frustration; far worse, it confirms of our deep fear that we are alone in our feelings, that nobody understands them, and nobody ever can. The bridge to others collapses into a chasm of all that can’t be said.

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We still try to say things. When we do, the imprecision of our words renders us unintelligible. The lack of the right word curses us with vagueness. It dooms us to deceit, and misunderstanding. I never said that! That isn’t what I mean!  Nobody is satisfied with such conversations. There are only hints and implications. The speaker wishes the listener would pay closer attention; the listener wishes the speaker would say what she really means. Nobody wins. All meaning is lost in the translation of one mind to another.

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On our own, the prospects are no better. The disturbance of an emotion cannot be appeased until it is identified. We need a torch to flash around inside us until it sheds light on the problem – ‘That! That is what I’m feeling.’ There is such relief in that. Things need to be named. We need to be able to draw distinctions between things. Naming something justifies its existence with proper attention. It enables the identification of others, who might then understand. Too often, things go unnamed. There are no words for what we feel, or if there are we don’t know them. We fumble in our own darkness with a faulty torch.

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Hope is not lost.

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~

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Ludwig Wittgenstein was a philosopher who wrote few things clearly, but most things precisely. He is another of the 20th century’s giants whose words sail high above my head but strike chords in me that always ring true. He said lots of things about words and our wrestles with them, often in riddles: ‘If a lion could speak, we could not understand him’; ‘Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent’. Once we are past the enigmas, I think his ideas give us reason for optimism.

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Language cannot be private. This is one of Wittgenstein’s ideas. Language requires at least two people – it necessarily connects us to others. When a mother points at a chair and says, ‘Chair!’, she tells her infant that ‘chair’ is the sound which corresponds to that kind of thing in the world. She is telling the child that if he says ‘chair’, people will know what he means. Other people call it a chair, so we will call it a chair, and we will all know exactly what we are talking about. The same goes for her child’s sadness, although emotions are harder to diagnose since we can only identify them through their symptoms. The mother sees the child’s tears and asks if he is feeling sad enough times for the infant to recognise that inward tug as sadness, and the tears of others as the same.

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Such are the rules of language that can only be taught by others. No word can be learned by individual observation or sensation. Someone has to point it out and tell you what it is called. If this were not the case, nobody would know what anybody was talking about. I would say ‘chair’ and you would say ‘eggplant’ and we would have no idea that we meant the same thing. Language only works in connection with others.

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The hope of this is that language inherently means people know what we are talking about. If it can be said, it can be understood. If you can be precise enough with your words, you can get someone to comprehend exactly what you mean. This is pretty remarkable – we can get an entire thought from one mind to another by means of words.

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But, our problem is not yet solved. Wittgenstein also reminds us that things are unsayable. We know this already; every time we watch a sun set over a sea or mountain and we have full bellies and warm coats and good friends, we know there are feelings that transcend language. Wittgenstein tells us that such things are unsayable because they do not align with the function of words. Words communicate facts. There is a chair, and we call it a chair. The correlation of a physical, factual reality with a word is the only way we can verify that the word is true. You point at a chair and call it an eggplant and I can tell you that you are wrong. It is, in fact, a chair, and I know this because there is the verifiable presence of a chair before us. How can you do this with a value? A feeling? A possibility?

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Unsayable realities demand alternatives to ordinary words. But words can do more than say. Words can show. All the things that matter to us resist ordinary communication – they are too elusive and transcendent for simple words. Language is not failing us when it does not give us a single word to capture our feeling. It is inviting us to express ourselves by another means – by allusion, representation, evocation. And words offer endless ways of doing this.

This is what was at play in my classroom when Virginia Woolf’s words elated me for some incommunicable reason. Of course I could not say exactly what it was that was so ecstatic in the scene – she couldn’t either! That is why she used a half-page sentence of layered images and active verbs and present participles and tricolon crescendos to express it. Such transcendent things are expressed though evocation. Simple words, no matter how abundant they are, fall short of capturing our feelings, and rightly so! We are far too complex and grand and infinite to be reduced to words. Such meaning finds translation through words, rather than in them.

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For the listener, or the reader, understanding here is reached not through comprehension, but through recognition. When I read that scene, I know that I know the feeling. That is the unsayable thing that leaps up in me afresh at the beckon of the words. I feel it without being able to say it. I recognise it before I understand. I know it with ‘irresistible immediacy’[1], like an old friend in a crowd or a fragrance of childhood. The same goes for all good art which, in soaring melodies and nuanced colours and careful carvings, evokes anew what we already know. We cry and we don’t know why. We sigh in silent splendour. Someone else feels what we feel.

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~

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Real expression is the realm of art. It transcends ordinary language. It is beyond words. But language can be art too. Right words used well offer truth wrapped in beauty. Like a varied colour palette in the hand of a painter, our wide vocabulary holds the potential for exquisite portraits. Nuanced words, like nuanced shades, can display endless depth and all the feelings that seem to lie beyond them. Beholders can hear and understand and relish their loveliness. Everything that matters is unsayable, but it is not inexpressible. We can go beyond words.

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“How can we combine the old words in new orders so that they survive, so that they create beauty, so that they tell the truth? That is the question.” – Virginia Woolf, BBC, 1937

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~

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This article is part of a project titled, 'Tell Me How You Really Feel'.

See more of the project here.

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References

[1] Leavis, F. R. 1948, The Great Tradition, Chatto and Windus, London, p. 204.

Bonevac, D 2013, ‘Wittgenstein’, Ideas of the Twentieth Century, University of Texas, Texas.

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Goldstein, I 2007, ‘Solipsism and the Solitary Language User’, Philosophical Papers, vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 35-47.

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Moyal-Sharrock, D 2019, ‘Literature as the Measure of Our Lives’, in H Appelqvist (ed.) Wittgenstein and the Limits of Language, Routledge, London.

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Wittgenstein, L 1922, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Kegan Paul, London.

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Wittgenstein, L 1958, Philosophical Investigations, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.