where language succeeds by failing
reading chekhov again (one of the many spoils from the bookshop raid), & I was kept up late last night by the thought that literature and stories can often convey so much more and deeply about human beings than psychology, sociology, analysis, anthropology and even history can; that perhaps truth can only take the form of poetry (respectful apologies to plato) because human truth & being are somehow more accurately inferred than conferred. it has taken innumerable books of literary criticism to sound out dostoyevsky's ethics, or nabakov's lolita. whole texts are written on single poems. samuel johnson writes: "sir, what is Poetry? why, sir, it is much easier to say what it is not. we all know what light is: but it is not easy to tell what it is." undoubtedly.
so I think that literature, and poetry more so, operate at the margins of meaning, where language begins to break down. they require a faith-leap of meaning; they say almost without saying. this failure to say is, I think, where literature triumphs over anthropology. to enter one of chekhov's storyworlds is to pledge that you will observe silently as he heaps his glorious images on the page, that your eye will travel along the paragraphs to the limits of his words, but that your mind and heart can (must) take over the journey from there, to infer all those unsaid & diaphanous truths drifting between the lines.