Phanopoeia, Melopoeia, Logopoeia
In response to comments by Mark and Jonathan in the comment box to my last post:
I think of phanopoeia, melopoeia, and logopoeia as concepts that invoke three different forms of image, where "image" is used to define any minimally complex mental structuration: visual, aural, and/or intellectual. The visual is mostly self-explanatory, though more on this in a second. The aural is pretty obvious too: "figures of sound," etc. The intellectual I think of as combining elements of both the visual and the aural, but more importantly, bringing "secondary" reflectiveness into the mix. Before I expand on this, however, let me say a little more about how I think syntax relates to the three terms.
I don't think something counts as an image until it is somehow made complex, composed of two or more parts. The phanopoetic image is the closest to an exception here, since we think of the visual image as capable of being self-contained, unitary: an apple, say. But even an apple is composed of different surfaces: skin, stem, leaf, gradations of light and texture, etc. What is at question is whether, for example, a single pure color constitutes an image--but I'll let that pass for now.
Similarly, a sound-image is never a single tone; it is always some combination of sounds. As you mention, Mark, rhythm is the salient factor. "Squirrel" alone is mostly a visual image, but "furry squirrel" creates a sound image because of its vocalic and trochaic repetitions. A single sound such as "I" or "a" may have complex connotations, but this is more a function of logopoeia than of melopoeia.
And in fact, the logopoetic can generally be seen as starting with some extension of the phano- and/or melopoetic. "Furry squirrel" becomes logopoetic when we think of the coincidence between the repeated er sound and the fact that squirrels are indeed furry, as though the words were consciously cooperating with each other to form the most appropriate possible pattern of alignments and resonances.
For all of these three types of image, then, arrangement or syntax is the enabling condition. If someone wants to quibble and say that an apple is not an arrangement but a unified perceptual fact, that's fine, as the phanopoetic, like the melopoetic, only really becomes interesting when it starts to verge on the logopoetic at any rate. When one considers an apple at the logopoetic level, it is anything but an isolable unit: it calls up worms, the Garden of Eden, Snow White, gifts for teacher, and any number of associative links.
Addendum: a quick search reveals to me that I talked about some of these same concerns in a blog post earlier this year, which I read now as though it had been written by someone else, so spotty my memory has become.
13 comments:
I'm not convinced that logo- is usually an extension of phano- and/or melo-. But then again I have my own private understanding of these concepts that others do not always share. I think Pound meant, among other things, the kind of effect that comes from using a word in a special relation to its normal usage. For example, if you found the expression "Golly gee whiz" in an Ashbery poem, you'd have to think of where else you would find somebody saying that, and what Ashbery's use of that expression does. That's not really an extension of a visual image or of a sound-effect.
I guess that's true, Jonathan. Amend my earlier statement to "often an extension."
I thought I sent a comment yesterday, but my computer was acting up and perhaps I didn't.
I appreciate it that confusions may be multiplying a bit here. Jonathan, if I'm getting your take, if I put it in my words it would look something like the three categories are sound, image, and a third category which encompasses the play between sound, image, and meaning--except that, as a category that encompasses all the other categories, it's more a meta-category. Maybe, unless we limit it to a special class of such play only.
On the other hand, the "effect that comes from using a word in a special relation to its normal usage" strikes me as what "meaning" is. But I guess you (or Pound?) might mean it more narrowly, as the particular effects of meaning as it is found in a work of literature, where plays on image and sound are to be expected?
I'm still trying to distinguish how what you say about the faux Ashbery line would be different from an ordinary speech situation, in which people would also have to reference their previous encounters with "Goolly gee whiz" in order to know how it was being used in the present instance.
I'm finding this all very intriguing.
It's interesting to see how Jonathan tweaks Pound's 3 "-peias" in the direction of NY School-style verbal play. Pound himself, in responding to Eliot's "Waste Land", said as much : he mocked his own minor aestheticism in comparison.
One should beware of a poetics so conveniently & neatly serviceable to critics. Poetry is not just a trivial word-game for academics. It's an attempt to articulate the inexpressible, to limn the high & the deep, to comprehend, to simplify the cacophony...
I'd like to quibble, I think.
Pound (ABC, p. 37) distinguished between words that have "hard, cut-off meanings" and words that do not.
"Bicycle now has a cut-off meaning. / But tandem, or 'bicycle built for two', will probably throw the image of a past decade upon the reader's mental screen."
I think the meaning of "apple" is cut-off. I don't think the word "apple" throws anything onto the mental imagination of the reader (certainly not an image of Eden).
"Apple" (unlike "tandem", at least at the time Pound was writing) does not generate an image except by being used in combination with other words (it must be situated with syntax).
"An apple in a tree"
"An apple on a white background"
"A bead of rain on an apple"
Because of my Roman Catholic upbring,
"apple" consistently evokes (among
other things) the Eden garden.
-
For those willing to go there, a
post entitled "Picture This: On the
Concept of Poetic Imagery" written
by Reginald Shepherd and a lengthy
comment by Cory Brown (both of
which relate to phanopoeia,
melopoeia, and logopoeia) persist at:
reginaldshepherd.blogspot.com/2007/
02/picture-this-on-concept-of-
poetic.html
That 2007-02-19 post and comment
were, for me, educative in ways I
did not expect. In the end it
appears nearly all who are serious
about language/ realize how deeply
words are metaphorical and shadowy.
I feel, Mark, that you are trying to reduce logopeia to other aspects of poetry. I feel it as it's own distinct thing, though. And there is no reason not to see it in everyday conversation either, so I don't quite get the objection that it would have to be different in a poem to say "golly gee."
We are attentive to the way in which words are used, as words. Their registers (high or low, antiquted or modern), their connotations and smells. This is not "meaning" or the interaction of sound and meaning, but the interaction between the expected lexical usage of a word and its particular context in the poem. Think of a translation that was "exact" in meaning but totally destroyed the poem's "wordiness."
Now maybe you think wordiness is just sound alone. I can't really argue you out of that position, but that's not what Pound thought, because he made it it's own category distinct from melos. Until a few days I thought everyone shared my definition of logopeia, but now I realize it's not really a clear concept in Pound's original definition. Perloff uses it as the basis of "The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Pound Tradition," so my definition might be derived from her usage indirectly.
It's interesting too that Pound doesn't mention tropes at all in his famous triad. In other words, he doesn't define poetry in terms of metaphor or other figures of speech. A lot of logopeia in my opinion would be figures of rhetoric. Hyperbaton and the like; figures of syntax that aren't explicitly visual. But that's just my interpretation.
Hi Jonathan:
No, I think I would be saying that "wordiness" is a combination of sound, image, and meaning, or at the very least a combination of sound and meaning. Thus having it as a third distinct category, after sound and meaning, seems not to work within this particular system of categories because the categories would overlap.
The point that we're both agreeing on, in our different ways, is that Pound's system of categories doesn't quite hold together.
I think where we differ is that you're inclined to try to create your own specific take of the third term (perhaps as you say, following Perloff) that makes the categories still workable, while I'm not sure that there's any way to do that or even that it's worthwhile. Like many categories, if considered too absolutely they don't finally describe the objects they intend to describe.
To me a category may be an entry point for thinking, but one that usually breaks down upon a closer look.
But before this discussion I hadn't realized how this fact applied to Pound's poetry trinity, and now I'm much clearer about it.
Thanks for these comments, Mark & Jonathan, they’re illuminating. Seems to be more here than can really fit into blog comment boxes.
I’ve been thinking about Jonathan’s point that “there is no reason not to see [logopoeia] in everyday conversation.” It reminded me of Jakobson’s warning about his “poetic” function of language, to wit: “Any attempt to reduce the sphere of the poetic function to poetry or to confine poetry to the poetic function would be a delusive oversimplification. The poetic function is not the sole function of verbal art but only its dominant, determining function, whereas in all other verbal activities it acts as a subsidiary, accessory constituent.”
I see Pound’s three “poeia”’s similarly: these are just the ways language--any language in use—can be “charged.” The charging could be in conversation, could be in poetry, but to Pound it’s perhaps more noticeable and, in Jakobson’s term, determinant in poetry.
Of course it’s a short leap from noticing such determinant elements of the poetic to making prescriptions and laws about what poetry isn’t, so I think it’s important to keep the overall aims of this criticism foregrounded. I feel it’s unfortunate Jakobson chose the term “poetic” for his science of language functions. It’s like choosing to make the president’s foot a universal measurement rather than the wavelength of light—regardless of J’s warning, it makes poetry look more historically fixed than it is or, in my mind, ought to be. The poetic is a matter of emergent (life) forms, so if it’s a universal science it’s more the way botany is a universal science: noticing and categorizing what appears rather than seeking to discover the laws of what can’t ever (although that’s probably a misunderstanding of botany, I admit). Sometimes Kasey’s taxonomic way of thinking, as well as my own, can begin to sound synchronic and eternal that way, but when he clarifies himself it’s often in the direction of the diachronic (i.e. notice how his notion of catachresis has gradually become the “catachretic experience” of any figurative language as it appears—in a given situation?--as Shklovskian defamiliarization, etc.).
In any case, I like Mark’s idea of categorical thinking as a mere entry point. I feel such thinking is important, actually vital, as a way to build logical clarity and mental (& possibly emotional) flexiblity, but ideally the categories burn away leaving a residue of responsiveness. How do you create a critical apparatus that foregrounds both clarity and plasticity? There’s a dilemma.
Last thing: it’s interesting that in “How To Read” Pound defines the 3 language-chargers in terms of translation: melo- can come across w/o knowing the language at all, phano- can come across by standard translation, while logo- can’t be translated at all. I don’t know what to make of that, but would be interested to hear Jonathan’s take on it.
Yrs,
brent
Thanks, Brent (and Mark too.) I think Pound's comment about translation is apt and possibly clarifying. It's pretty obvious why melopoeia is not translatable, because prosodical structures are what gets left behind almost by definition. It's also obvious why visual images are translatable. The image is not purely verbal, though conjured up in words. The moon is a fish of silver. La luna es un pez de plata. That translation is absolutely perfect from the point of view of phanopoeia.
Logopoeia would not be translatable, then, because it would be dependent on the specific uses of specific words. Try to translate "phat" into another language. Now imagine a poem in which many of the words were like that--taking their meaning from the specificity of their usage, their etymology or cultural embeddedness, etc...
Succinctly & helpfully put, Jonathan. Thanks.
Just to speak a few more thoughts out loud, this makes me wonder whether logopoeia doesn't just sort of rebound back to the same problems any discussion of translation has? Namely, what's our evidence for any unitary language "culture" as a specifically knowable object? The supposedly culturally embedded interpretation of "phat," for instance, is inconsistent even in this culture (which starts & ends where?). It's easy for me to imagine a translation of phat into spanish where a certain spanish-speaking person would get the meaning far better than my father would currently get phat in english, even though he lives in (a?) (the?) (another?) culture. And what trans-subjective entity grounds the meaning of a poem in the first place? Authorial intention?
This problem of the absence of practical use from Pound's system is maybe clearer if we keep Pound's original "charging" idea in mind. He's not talking about how meaning in general happens, but about how charged meaning happens. So if one cuts against the standard usage to charge the word "fat" by, say, playing off the latent "phat" connotations in (some parts of) the culture, this is phanopoeia. On the other hand just using the word "phat" to someone extremely familiar with the usage might be like "bicycle" now, just a word among words, and not phanopoeia at all. How do we know the difference? What determines a cliche as cliche, versus any language use as new, if not the position of the subject in time & space?
Like with Viktor Shklovsky's ostrannie I find the formal & abstract structure Pound is suggesting reallly useful and illuminating, but it can also be philosophically and actually misleading. Broadly I'm trying to ask what motivates each of them (and a lot of other formalists) to neglect the practical question of language use *for whom* and *by whom*. (For Pound this neglect happens openly just before the triad is spelled out in chapter 4 of the ABCs of reading...I don't have it here but something about "different men will disagree in specific and different cases...HOWEVER...it is still possible...phano...melo...logo..." etc.) So keeping the "why" of the formal system foregrounded somehow. Does Pound have political reasons for minimizing practical use in his system? Does a particular and fixed idea of unitary culture travel inevitably along with his system? Same with Shklovskly...same with Peirce and Saussuer...Kant...etc.
yrs,
Brent
Those are thought provoking questions. Not to abuse Kasey's comment boxes further with this lengthy discussion, but I think, with the "phat" example, or "boyz," that those would be recognized even by people outside of the sub-culture as belonging to a particular subculture. So they would have some logpoetic value in either case. All the more so if their meaning were a bit fuzzy.
Though within that culture they could lose their value if they became as banalized through overuse as "shoe."
Whereas phat could only be translated as a loan word, since part of its value is referential, no? It is almost the proper name of a particular cultural value like the duende.
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