Again and again Bachmann shows how “the flawed language that has been passed onto us” can lead us to question what we know to be real, our own suffering selves included, and she asks what it means to grapple with these antinomies of world and word as public and political matters, not just private ones—indeed what it means to be a writer at all. “If we had the word, if we had language, we would not need weapons,” she said in a 1959 lecture. Having lived through the war herself, she meant it.
Literature, which is itself unable to say what it is and only reveals itself as a thousand-fold and multi-millennial infraction against flawed language—for life has only a flawed language—and which therefore confronts flawed language with a utopia; this literature, then, however closely it might cling to the time period and its flawed language, must be praised for desperately and incessantly striving toward the utopia of language. Only for that reason is it a source of splendor and hope for humankind. Its most vulgar languages and its most pretentious ones still share in a dream of language; every word, every syntax, every period, punctuation, metaphor, and symbol redeem something of our dream of expression, a dream that is never entirely to be realized.
Both above are the excert from Boston Review.
I experienced bitter disappointment at how useless language was when it came to talking about the things you really loved. – Nanako Hanada