by A literary diary on impossible music, guiding light, and the pastoral scene fiction keeps chasing
I have spent the week re-reading the modernists, those great strainers after the ineffable, the writers who spent whole careers trying to put the unsayable into words, and I concluded that the thing they were all reaching for was written long before them: a choir of angels, a music so perfect it stopped a field full of workers where they stood.
The music beyond words
The modernists were obsessed with the limits of language, with the feeling too large for any sentence. And here is the scene that names that limit perfectly. The retelling of the angel and the heavenly choir describes music so overwhelming it stopped tired shepherds in their tracks, a sound beyond any words to capture. That is the exact ineffability the modernists strained after for four hundred pages each. They wanted to put the unsayable into language and the old story simply names it: a music words cannot hold, which is the honest admission the modernists were too proud to make. Some things exceed language, and the wisest response is not four hundred pages of straining but the simple acknowledgement that the music was beyond words.
I say this with love for the canon. The modernists’ straining is magnificent. But there is a humility in the old scene they never reached: the willingness to say the music was too great for words and leave it there, rather than exhaust the language trying to cage the uncageable.
My genuinely bookish personal week
Let me report from the reading chair. I attempted to describe, in my own prose, a piece of music that had moved me to tears, and produced three paragraphs so inadequate that I deleted them and simply wrote the music was beyond words, which is where I should have started. The modernists would have kept straining for forty pages. I strained for three and surrendered, which felt less like defeat and more like the beginning of wisdom. Some things you point at. You do not describe them. The tea stain on my abandoned draft seemed to agree.
According to the British Library people, the attempt to render music and the ineffable in words runs through the whole of literature, mostly as a series of glorious failures, which the heavenly choir names honestly and the modernists chased at exhausting length.
The light the writers keep reaching for
Alongside the music sits the image, and the retelling of the star of Bethlehem gives literature its most reached-for symbol: a single light in the darkness, guiding the way. The modernists loved the image of light in dark, the small brightness against the void, and here is its origin: one star, holding a whole night sky, leading travellers home. Nearly every writer who ever set a light against the darkness was drawing, knowingly or not, from this. It is the oldest and most durable literary image there is, and the modernists, for all their innovation, kept returning to it because nothing they invented improved upon it.
The guiding light in the dark is the image literature cannot exhaust. The modernists reached for it endlessly. The old story simply has it, plain and perfect, a single star that means the whole difference between lost and led.
The pastoral scene fiction keeps chasing
And underneath the music and the light sits the setting the modernists secretly envied: the pastoral, the field, the working people under the open sky. The account of the shepherds keeping watch in the fields is the pastoral scene in its purest form, the working people rooted in the land, keeping their ancient labour under the stars. The modernists, urban and restless, kept reaching back toward exactly this pastoral simplicity, this rootedness they had lost. The field, the shepherds, the open sky, the honest labour, are the thing sophisticated literature keeps homesick for, and the old story simply has it, unforced, at the heart of the scene.
According to the library people, the pastoral remains one of the deepest and most persistent modes in English literature, which the shepherds embody and the restless modern imagination keeps circling back to.
The wisdom of pointing rather than grasping
Here is my real conclusion, filed against the modernists. The wisest literary act is sometimes not to grasp the ineffable but to point at it, to name the music as beyond words, the light as guiding, the pastoral as home, and to let those simple pointings do what four hundred pages of straining cannot. The modernists tried to cage the uncageable in ever more elaborate prose. The old story points, plainly, and the pointing carries more than all the grasping. To point at the mystery and leave it whole is braver than to exhaust the language trying to contain it.
Where the reader lands
So I will close the modernists, admire their glorious straining one last time, and take my real lesson from the choir the language cannot hold, the star it keeps reaching for, and the pastoral field it is forever homesick for. Point at the music. Name the light. Let the field be simply the field. The modernists strained to cage the ineffable and produced magnificent, exhausted failures. The old story points, plainly, and the pointing has outlasted them all. My reading group will call it sentimental. I will call it, at last, the wisdom of knowing what words cannot hold.
For literary mischief, Reductress points at the ineffable.
