Writing and the "Prisonhouse" of Language

by Julia Buckley
In writing there is always that terrible disconnect between what is in one's mind and what translates into text on paper. It's never the same, is it?--no matter how hard we labor. I always end up deciding "Well, it's not exactly what I was thinking, but it's pretty good."

This notion that we can't even translate our own language has always fascinated me. I've blogged before about the Romantics who thought that writing inspiration was "magical." But recently I read a reference to Fredric Jameson (a literary scholar and Marxist political theorist), who described this disconnect as "the prisonhouse of language" because we are, in a sense, trapped with the thoughts that we can never entirely express, and limited by the size of our vocabularies.

I wonder if there is a better way to tap the thoughts that float in our brains. Are they hard to access because we think in symbol and metaphor, and therefore cannot always translate those into words? Would we write better under hypnosis? Or would our thoughts, like translated dreams, make no sense at all?

When I ask my students what they consider the hardest part of writing, the largest percentage of them say it is starting--merely starting--after which the writing may not flow, but at least it comes through. It's the beginning that involves opening that prison door and finding some way to connect the abstract to the concrete.

Writing, when it comes right down to it, is a miracle and a mystery.

Have you ever had a writing experience in which your product matched your idea? Can you recall the frustration of the opposite?

Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world."

So, to all writers, from novelists to those who compose grocery lists: do you ever feel that your words actually LIMIT your writing rather than ENABLE it?

My philosophical question for the day.