WHAT IS WRITING?
any effect, he does not therefore become a poet; he is a writer who is
talking to say nothing. We have seen enough of language inside out;
it is now time to look at it right side out.
6
The
art
of prose is employed in discourse; its substance is by
nature significative; that is, the words are first of
all
not objects but
designations for objects; it is not first of all a matter of knowing
whether they please or displease
in
themselves, but whether they cor–
rectly indicate a certain thing or a certain notion. Thus, it often
happens that we find ourselves possessing a certain idea that someone
has taught us by means of words without being able to recall a single
one of the words which have transmitted it to us.
Prose is first of all an attitude of mind.
As
Valery would say,
there is prose when the word passes across our gaze as the glass across
the sun. When one is in danger or in difficulty he grabs any instru–
ment. When the danger is past, he does not even remember whether
it was a hammer or a stick ; moreover, he never knew; all he needed
was a prolongation of his body, a means of extending his hand to
the highest branch. It was a sixth finger, a third leg, in short, a
pure function which he assimilated. Thus, regarding language, it is
our shell and our antennae; it protects us against others and informs
us about them; it is a prolongation of our senses, a third eye which
is going to look into our neighbor's heart. We are within language
as within our body. We
fe el
it spontaneously while going beyond it
toward other ends, as we feel our hands and our feet; we perceive
it when it is the other who is using it, as we perceive the limbs of
others. There is the word which is lived and the word which is met.
But in both cases it is in the course of an undertaking, either of me
acting upon others, or the other upon me. The word is a certain
particular moment of action and has no meaning outside of it. In cer–
tain cases of aphasia the possibilities of acting, of understanding
situations, and of having normal relations with the other sex, are lost.
At the heart of this apraxia the destruction of language appears
only as the collapse of one of the structures, the finest and the most
apparent. And if prose is never anything but the privileged instru–
ment of a certain undertaking, if it is only the poet's business to con–
template words in a disinterested fashion, then one has the right to
ask the prose-writer from the very start, "What is your
aim
in writing?
19
