An Ineffable Paper

“Language emerges out of the unsaid, moves toward the to-be-said, and passes beyond, as well as beneath, the said and the sayable to the unsayable” (Innis 107). This quote is a good place to start, because it creates the very experience it is referring to. Like in a dream, thoughts and emotions do not occur in a timeline, but instead all at once. And in the same vein, trying to organize, or translate these thoughts and emotions into a narrative that happens over time is somewhat impossible. Just like the task of the inter-translator, the interpreter of thoughts (in this case, me), or intra-translator has to decide on the order in which to convey the simultaneous sets of thoughts that occur in one instant. This is further made challenging by the fact that every timeless second, there is a new, or evolved set of thoughts needing to be translated. To return to that original set that needs to be communicated, just like attempting to recall a dream, becomes more and more frustratingly impossible as each infinite moment passes. In this way, my language is moving towards the to-be-said, skirting past the sayable and the said, and back to the unsayable, or the further unsaid.
Now, I will attempt to break down the unsaid into what I perceive to be smaller, more sayable concepts. For this idea to function or be translated into the thoughts of others, I would like it if you would imagine (with me) that the mind is a crucible. In this crucible the elements of perception, reaction, and external stimulus are smelted together to form linguistic thoughts. The simplest formula is to take one of each element, but this is the same as being an infant. At this point in time, we are working with multiple perceptions, reactions, and stimuli at the same time. In this fashion we form the sets of thoughts in the unsaid.
Next we have the brief intermediate stage Innis calls the “to-be-said.” This is the process of lingual thinking moving through consistently changing sets of thoughts of the unsaid. Continuing forward, we should be soon hitting the sayable or said. Instead, Innis takes us beyond or beneath into the unsayable. I would think that this is the case because most new ideas begin in the unsayable. Innis says this because he would like us to consider that language may fall short of the complex sets of thoughts of the unsaid we are able to process towards the to-be-said.
I would call this a problem. If we pass beyond and beneath the sayable and the said, we’ve essentially avoided communicating with anyone else. This is where I want to introduce Gregory Rabassa. “In light of the above, then, translation is really what we might call transformation. It is a form of adaptation, making the new metaphor fit the original metaphor, and in a bad translation the results can be most procrustean” (Rabassa 2). Take the word “procrustean,” for example. I am assuming many of the people who read this would have to look up this word in a dictionary in order to comprehend it. But, before we even do that, we can begin to see its function based on the context in the quote. If we were stretching our imaginations a little further, we may even draw out the word “crust” from the center (although this doesn’t actually have a lot to do with the actual meaning), so before we even grasp the entirety of the semantics, we have preset unsaid thought sets. Then, once we look it up, we discover that it essentially means “enforcing uniformity or conformity without regard to natural variation or individuality” (from the OED), which we then can simplify, based on the context, into the word “boring.” Even stranger though, before the word “procrustean” we must consider the word that it came from: Procrustes, who is a mythical giant, who was known as a thief and a murderer (also from the OED). “We are what we are called, to such a degree that ever so many adjectives have been coined from proper names” (Rabassa 4). The point of this long tangent is twofold: Firstly, it offers us an opportunity to see semiosis in action, and secondly despite the ridiculous ideas above, I have said something sayable, using a “new metaphor [to] fit the original metaphor.”
As improbable as it seems, I sense I am close to making that stop at the said and the sayable, before pushing through from the to-be-said to the unsayable. Ultimately, it seems that the quote that Innis refers to from Truth and Method by Gadamer contains the solution to the unsayable:
“Every word breaks forth as if from a center and is related to a whole, through which alone it is a word. Every word causes the whole of language to which it belongs to resonate and the whole view of the world which lies behind it to appear. Thus every word, in its momentariness, carries with it the unsaid, to which it is related by responding and indicating….All human speaking is finite in such a way that there is within it an infinity of meaning to be elaborated and interpreted” (Innis 112, Gadamer 425-26).
My new metaphor to fit the original in Innis is essentially the harmonics in the Music of the Spheres. With one note, the musician can produce a large variety of secondary notes or overtones, which don’t exist in the normal range of the instrument. In language, the harmonics become the said, and the overtones represent the transformation of the unsayable into the (barely) sayable. Now, hopefully, “language emerges out of the unsaid, moves toward the to-be-said, and passes” (Innis 107) through the said before transforming the unsayable into the sayable.
Ultimately, the goal here is to say, that I can say something to you. I did it in the most indirect way possible. Just as in music, where the instrument and the performer, each on their own, don’t inherently contain music, language isn’t inherently communicable by itself. It is the resonance between the instruments that is the human being, and the unsaid (perceptions, reactions, stimuli) that create communication.




Works Cited
Innis, Robert E. “Language and the Thresholds of Sense: Some Aspects of the Failure of Words.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 22·2 (2008): 106-117.

Gregory Rabassa, John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte, ed. The Craft of Translation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.

“Procrustean.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2010. http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50189241?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=procrustean&first=1&max_to_show=10