Jennifer Egan's Dive for the Inarticulate

Forty years ago, the poet and literary critic William Harmon distinguished between two ways in which language can fail. Writing in these pages, Harmon observed that speechlessness and silences can be markers of frustration, incapacity, and failed connections. Think of the disjointed language of William Faulkner's Benjy Compson inThe Sound and the Furyor, more recently, the silences of the ghostly character Given who haunts Jesmyn Ward'sSing, Unburied, Sing.Alternatively, spaces beyond the horizons of language can embody a tranquility so thorough and full of meaning that words would mar the perfection of the moment. In this second sense, inarticulateness is a point of peace and stillness toward which language is at best a clumsy passage. Harmon contended that in the twenty years between the world wars the poetry of T.S. Eliot shifted from the first sense of inarticulateness to the second (450).