Beyond Formalisms
For now, we need to expand still further the critical and theoretical context within which the play of phrasal alternatives in poetry can be addressed. We turn from Riffaterre's paragram (including here the "paraphone" as well) to the frequent stylistic investigations of two very different critics. In their divergent vocabularies and allegiances—the one a leading promulgator of poststructuralist theory in America, the other an inveterate British humanist—Geoffrey Hartman and Christopher Ricks each nurture in their work a sense of potentially subversive lexical free play that resembles Riffaterre's "agrammaticality" as the very definition of literariness. In "The Voice of the Shuttle: Language from the Point of View of Literature," an important essay from Beyond Formalism , Hartman skirts very near to Riffaterre with his idea of an embedded "seed phrase" bursting in various contortions upon the surface of a poetic line.[11] Like Ricks as well, Hartman is interested in the layered reticulation of a text (in the root sense of a textured fabric) woven upon a "silence" that will not quite stay put. In Ricks, too, this silence is every bit as "volcanic" as Hartman dubs it (342), and from it may erupt at any turn the rejected or dismembered phrases that might, alternatively, have gone to make it up: the matrix as cauldron. In Ricks's collected essays, The Force of Poetry , the ground of poetic meaning seethes with pressures upon it that do not quite become presences in it, the shimmering surface of a poetic line alive with tremors from beneath.[12]
Hartman's essay, however, is both narrower and broader at once. It proposes a complex interchange between the "microstructures of literature, entities studied by linguists" (341) and the largest narratological issues of mythic plotting. He moves, for instance, from such "cross-eyed" phonetic structures as chiastic alliteration to the fateful double cross of the Oedipus story. At its most provocative, in fact, his essay describes an even larger trajectory, moving from the space between syllables and words to that breathing space of "indeterminate middles" between "overspecified ends"
(339) which develops as a kind of structuralist definition of human life as plot. One of Hartman's examples of alliterative chiasmus, among several sound figurations he takes up, is the "famous pun" in Paradise Lost, "O Eve in evil hour." What Hartman does not do with this phrasing, this voweling, is instructively continuous with what he does. "To go from 'Eve' to 'evil' is a metaphor on the level of sound" (343), he writes, as if he were directly alluding to Jakobson's notion of echoic substitution in the axis of combination, his "figures of sound." Hartman's gravitation toward a "transformational poetics" of the "zero value" (341) is illustrated here between the bonded phonemic halves of ev/il(l) . What, this particular sound figure of "etiological distancing" (338) asks us to ask, is the direction of causal descent? Which came first: the evil or its namesake? When Hartman suggests that the power of the line derives from the overtones of derivation itself, "the sense of a third term or matrix, a common root from which both might have sprung" (343), his (unmentioned) overlap with the work of Riffaterre (as well as that of Jakobson) could hardly be more direct. What Riffaterre would advance in answer to Hartman's question about the priority of Eve or evil might well be that the whole conundrum is materialized as the variant of a more overtly formulaic teasing with false etymology. The text is produced in this sense as the paragrammatic dodge of a pat aphorism like "The Eve in all evil," as in the comparable (if commonplace) punning of a bromide like "Woman means woe to man." In any case, it should be clear that Hartman is intrigued to read in such a case the projection of paradigmatic equivalences onto syntactically deployed paronomasia in a manner that certainly calls up the "conversions" and "expansions" of Riffaterre's semiotics.
Beyond this, there is in linguistics a more problematic sense of juncture or "zero value" ambiguously negotiated between words, which Hartman hints at but never pursues directly. Illustrating the "language jam in which we are stuck" (343), which is often enacted in poetry as a jamming at intersections, and drawing on Elizabeth Sewell's linguistically imprecise but suggestive notion of the "soundlook" of words (341), Hartman offers as example of junctural irony the title of Wallace Stevens's "Le Monocle de mon Oncle." Comments Hartman: "Technically defined the difference in sound is a slight distortion of quantity but primarily a matter of what linguists call 'boundary' or 'juncture'—here typographically indicated by 'monocle' dividing into two words, 'mon oncle'" (341). Once again, a poetic test case is generated from, in Jakobson's sense, a metonymic projection of sameness in a paronomastic domino play. Hartman's allusions there to the linguistics of "juncture," however, have an even more direct bearing on the present explorations than do his literary examples. Though none of his quotations is strictly ambiguous in its phonemic boundaries, he tangentially invokes a whole range of debate, as
summarized in Kooij's Ambiguity in Natural Language , about the functioning of so-called suprasegmental phonemes—namely, pitch, stress, and juncture—to enforce lexical decidability. More so than with a chiming phrasal balance like "monocle" and "mon oncle," the classic problem for phonological "disambiguation" (the problem of telling where one word ends and the next begins) arises with such "minimal pairs" as "an aim" and "a name," "night rate" and "nitrate," "light housekeeper" and "lighthouse keeper"—or, for that matter, our inaugural instance from Austin, "I stink" and "Iced ink."[13] Such a phonic crux has sometimes been addressed not only by the general notion of "suprasegmentals" but by the concept of a sliding phoneme of "zero" value, a so-called zero allophone of internal open juncture (19). It is this linguistic feature to which Hartman may be alluding in his mention of "zero values." For many linguists, however, as Kooij observes, this offers a suspect account, a "fiction" (11) designed to rescue segmental autonomy. In the study of adjusted and suspended junctures, one is advised to recall Jakobson's postulate: "From a strictly articulatory point of view . . . there is no succession of sounds. Instead of following one another the sounds overlap."[14] In view of this fact, a purer example of junctural value under poetic pressure, one not requiring a footnoted disclaimer like Hartman's ("I am aware that 'oc' and 'onc' contain a different phoneme"[341]), would have been provided by another cryptic Stevens title, "United Dames of America." In this brief poem about political oratory, the title, in its outrageous homophonic spoof of "United Aims of America," becomes a virtual textbook example of ambiguous juncture in a minimal "pairing"—one phrase written, the other (silently) sounded.
We should now be able to return more alertly yet to the linguistically gauged plight of Eve in the garden, at exactly the point where Hartman himself broke off with her. The "zero value" reinvested with force is not just the lexical cipher at the morphemic boundary between syllables, "Eve" elided with "il(l)." Further, there is the actual liaison in speech that overdetermines both ends of the punning phrase. Given that its second vowel in standard pronunciation is /
for instance, or between h and its silent phantom double, would themselves be included, however, in Hartman's hedging analogy drawn from conjectural physics: "You probably feel as impatient with me, and all this talk about zero values, as Bishop Berkeley with Newton's infinitesimals. He called these entities, calculable only by Newton's theory of fluxions, the 'ghosts of departed quantities'" (347). My very slight "impatience," and I assume that of others, comes simply from Hartman's own, his itch to dart away from a further speculation on the linguistic—or call them semiotic—implications of the stylistic intricacies he puts under such intensive scrutiny. More even than his approach is inclined to tally, zero values count.
Larger questions are certainly at play, and at stake, in the structural, psychoanalytic, and philosophical reverberations of Hartman's essay than in any of the twenty papers collected by Ricks in The Force of Poetry . Yet neither critic pursues his speculations quite far enough for close readings to open upon a principle of textual generation. Ricks, for once, is almost as near to a delimited but genuine theoretical breakthrough as is Hartman. Indeed, Hartman's use of Berkeley's phrase "ghosts of departed quantities" reads like a paraphrase of Ricks evoking the poetic vanishing act of the "anti-pun." Words, phrases, syntactic understandings are momentarily enrolled only to be annulled by context, "surmised and then ruled out" (101). The phenomenon turns up everywhere in Ricks's essays, on writers from John Gower to Geoffrey Hill, being more or less implicit in his previous stylistic considerations of Milton and Keats as well. With Wordsworth's phrase "fleet waters of a drowning world," for instance, Ricks calls attention to the "anti-pun" on "fleet" as noun. The adjectival form of this monosyllabic "variant" (to recall Riffaterre's term) would, according to Ricks, "be careless or perverse if it were not positively (rather than forgetfully or willfully) setting aside the other sense" (101). He garners his characteristic authorial validation for this by quoting Wordsworth's definition of the poetic temperament as the "'disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present'" (100). In what might well be taken as a "semiotics of poetry" capacious enough to embrace such contradictory semantic signals, absent definitions in Ricks's readings hover like ghostly revenants over the text, often with a sense of violent irrelevance. They create at once a linguistic siege and its own resistance.
Though Ricks would never put his case in strict linguistic terms, it is as though binary oppositions from the axis of selection bedevil the syntagmatic axis as phrasal impertinences—and must be staved off. In Robert Lowell, for instance, one semantic sense "gains its territory by fighting off" the invasive double. The denotation that emerges "means intensely by meaning the whole thing including its exclusion," a "phantasmal violence" (271) of "potent
absences" and "vigorous spectral combats" (268). Poems "muscular with these ripples of solicited misconstruction," these "warring possibilities" (269), take their part in the "anti-sense" of a "violence-acknowledging non-violence"—a phrase which itself, read (aloud) without the hyphens, aptly enunciates (Ricks leaves us to discover) its own seditious converse. Without for a moment admitting the claims of any tradition of reading other than the line of Empson and Donald Davie, though with a few approving asides about some of Hartman's insights, Ricks is nevertheless very much in phase here with the shared perception in Saussure and Riffaterre that "the text's true center is outside the text." The intertextual variants are generated for him by a tension between legible surface and (Ricks's recurrent word) its indirect "force" of evocation.
Like Riffaterre, too, Ricks tends to minimize the acoustic in his lexical investigations. He is willing to hear a homophonic pun in Gower between "braieth" and "prayeth." And he will homophonically pun himself in assessing Gower's instance of pertinent opposition in the paradigmatic axis as an "air's-breath" difference (10) between plosives. But he does not generally seem alert to the possibility of what I would call the antiphone rather than anti-pun, that antiphonal or contrapuntal phantom latching upon lexical units and breaking down their integrity. If a critic were to grant that there is a phonic slippage of this kind inherent in language, an irresolute and disruptive drifting that destablizes any given constraint upon the bonding of phonemes into words, then that critic would also have to face a fact about (to reverse Hartman's subtitle) literature-from-the-point-of-view-of-language. Such language is in some ways too heterogeneous and dispersive for an author-centered aesthetic like Ricks's, too freakish, eccentric, and insubordinate.