Can language capture the enormity of experience?

Can language capture the enormity of experience? The answer of this question depends on the purpose of language and the situations that influences the language.

When language just serves as a tool of communication, such as an academic paper, business reports and presentation, or any situation that requires formal and professional language, logos is the priority in order to capture the enormity and complexity of the authors’ ideas because in these situations, audiences are expecting a clear explanation and illustration from the authors rather than artfully crafted and flowery language. In other words, as long as the organization and structure of the paper or the presentation is clear and logical, the enormity of the authors’ idea should be able to convey.

It is much more demanding when language is beyond communication and needed to be artfully crafted. For example, the language in literature, in movies especially those literary films, and in dramas, is so beautifully crafted and delivered and full of emotions. The ideas in an academic paper or business reports are concrete and can be supported by examples or data, however, in literature and movies, the theme can be very vague and sentimental, which is much more difficult and abstract to describe. Therefore, pathos plays a more dominant role in these situations, where audiences are not expecting a straightforward explanation but emotional appeals and artfully crafted language. In these situations, one of the most common strategy is making emotional appeals which let audiences feel the feelings of the characters. It is often the case that the emotion of the characters is very complicated and contradicted, thus to state it directly may not be a good idea since it is too challenging not to confuse the audiences. Rather, sometimes silence means everything.

The most touching and impressive emotional appeals I have seen is in the Academy award film, “The Reader”, where the technique of letting the audiences fill in the “blank” left by the character is employed. At the end of the film, Michael Berg visited the Jewish woman whose family were killed in Auschwitz by Hanna Schmitz and confessed his relationship with Hanna, “we had an affair when I was in youth, but…”. After these words, Michael sat there deep in thought. He didn’t continue his words, such as saying “but I can not forget her.’’ He controlled his emotion and did not say what the audiences are expecting him to say, however his words capture much more than he says out. That moment in the movie is the most emotion-arousing moment for me just because he didn’t say and I had to fill in the blank, which can have so many possibilities. It may be a mixed feeling of regretted, mercy, painful, and remorse for Hanna and it brings the audiences into a deeper level of emotion, deeper than the feeling of missing a former relationship. Often in the movies, which only have limited time for a convoluted story, this technique of having the audiences to imagine the “silence” works surprisingly well.

Language can convey much more than it says because of the amazing fact that people can understand not only the explicit words but the implicit meaning in language. Besides movies, this technique can also apply to other situations where the language is manipulated and crafted to be a deviation from usual way. For example, tropes and pathetic figure are the rhetorical tools that plays with language. In both cases, there are implicit meanings behind, the prototype that is represented by them. I think that provides a possibility for language to capture the enormity of experiences and emotion. That’s why language is a form of art when it serves more than communication.