WHAT IS WRITING?
from their stooping leanness and their pale diamond-shaped tights,
are emotion become flesh, emotion which the flesh has absorbed as the
blotter absorbs
ink,
and emotion which is unrecognizable, lost, strange
to itself, scattered to the four corners of space and yet present to itself.
I have no doubt that charity or anger can produce other objects,
but they will likewise be swallowed up; they will lose their name;
there will remain only things haunted by a mysterious soul. One does
not paint significations; one does not put them to music. Under these
conditions, who would dare require that the painter or musician en–
gage himself?
On the other hand, the writer deals with significations. Still, a
distinction must
be
made. The empire of signs is prose; poetry is on
the side of painting, sculpture, and music. I am accused of detesting
it; the proof, so they say, is that
Lc~
Temps Modernes
publishes very
few poems. On the
c~ntrary,
this is proof that we like it. To be con–
vinced, all one need do is take a look at contemporary production.
"At least," critics say triumphantly, "you can't even dream of en–
gaging it." Indeed. But why should I want to? Because it uses words
as does prose? But
it
does not use them in the same way, and it does
not even
use
them at all. I should rather say that it serves them.
Poets are men who refuse to
utilize
language. Now, since the quest
for truth takes place in and by language conceived as a certain kind
of instrument, it is unnecessary to imagine that they aim to discern
or expound the true. Nor do they dream of
naming
the world, and,
this
being the case, they name nothing at all, for naming implies
a perpetual sacrifice of the name to the object named, or, as Hegel
would say, the name is revealed as the inessential in the face of the
thing which is essential. They do not speak, neither do they keep still;
it is something different. It has been said that they wanted to destroy
the "word" by monstrous couplings, but this is false. For then they
would have to be thrown into the midst of utilitarian language and
would have had to try to retrieve words from it in odd little groups,
as for example "horse" and "butter" by writing "horse of butter.
..a
Besides the fact that such an enterprise would require infinite
time, it is not conceivable that one can keep oneself on the plane of
the utilitarian project, consider words as instruments, and at the same
contemplate taking their instrumentality away from them. In fact,
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