Words and Moods: The Transference of Literary Knowledge

THE EPIGRAPHS CHOSEN TO INTRODUCE THIS ESSAY on literary transference posit the existence of unspoken or wordless worlds, unformulated inner spaces that we cannot access directly, but that nonetheless shape us and form part of our utterances. Tracing the formation of such spaces back to early infancy, Christopher Bollas argues that the modes in which an infant is received and cared for, and the ways in which its earliest sensory experiences are stimulated and organized, establish a “grammar of being” that precedes the acquisition of language. Even after the symbolic order of language is put into play, this early “grammar” retains its force, inhabiting language as an unspoken dimension, or, as Bollas calls it, an “unthought known.” This spatial conception of language and knowledge suggests that what we commonly refer to as a person’s “inner space” is transposed into an “inner space” of language and thus accessible to communication.