Poetry as Catachresis
William Ward, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" (2006).
Anne observes that "catachresis works to create poetic meaning by foregrounding syntax."
I think this is right. Roman Jakobson makes a compatible point when he says that "the poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination": that is, poetic language extends our attention more or less away from what the individual words and sounds are to the way in which they are arranged in relation to one another. It is an obvious fact of language use that we first learn what individual terms mean, and we then learn to combine them in longer, articulated utterances. Language can only ever be "poetic" on that second, syntactical level; no single word in isolation is poetic (unless some way is found of highlighting the relation of the components of the word to each other, of exaggerating their articulatedness, as in Aram Saroyan's "lighght," in which case we are back in syntactical territory).
Take for example Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening":
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
And miles to go before I sleep.
The sentences that make up this poem are meaningful in the ordinary sense in that they are mostly conventional grammatical utterances, placed so as to inform us that the speaker is out in his carriage in the snow, that he has certain feelings, etc. Syntax is what allows us to process this information, but most of us are not made particularly aware of this while reading the poem: that we can understand it seems "natural," an unmediated apprehension of content. We are able to understand that the speaker speaks of his horse as though it were endued with human perceptions and sentiments, and this might seem to be one of the "poetic" aspects of the text. To the extent that the gesture is metaphorical, this is not altogether untrue, but here as well, we are not likely to stop ourselves in the middle of the poem and reflect on the poet's anthropomorphization of the animal. Again, it seems very "straightforward": the metaphor is naturalized to fit the referential context, and thus is almost invisible.
The reader is reasonably likely, however, to note Frost's use of rhyme, meter, and repetition, and (more to the point), the way he has arranged the sentences to fit within the structure prescribed by those formal constraints. If the poem possesses any "poetic meaning" that is distinct from the ordinary kinds of meaning discussed above, it must originate from within the awareness of these devices, and the conspicuous syntactical "deviations" created to accommodate them. To put it more simply, let us ask whether the sentence
My little horse must think it is strange to stop so far from any farmhouse
and the verses
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
"mean" anything different on the referential level. If we agree that they don't, and if we still maintain that the verses have a special poetic meaning over and above their ordinary meaning, that poetic meaning must have something to do with the fact that the verses a) rhyme, b) are in iambic tetrameter, c) require as a result that normative syntax be manipulated, and d) thus produce in the mind of the reader/hearer an effect that is irreducible to that produced by referential sense alone.
It might appear as though I am claiming that "catachresis" is synonymous with "poeticity"--and in a sense I am. Any use of "figural" language that does not immediately identify itself as conforming to the conventionalized expectations attending metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, et al. must be experienced first as catachretic, and it is only within this space of catachretic experience that the shock (mild or extreme) of poeticity can affect the reader/hearer. This is what Shklovsky has in mind with his formulation of ostranenie (defamiliarization, estrangement): the thing in the text that makes the reader think "this can't be the right way to say this!" (and thus leads her to think in more depth about whatever the subject may be, though this next step leads us away from the catachretic aspect of defamiliarization and toward its didactic or logical applications).
A poem like "Stopping by Woods" is not catachretic in any obvious or deliberate way. There are no points in it at which we scratch our heads and wonder what Frost could possibly mean, or are made to stop in bemusement at a tortured figure. Nevertheless, purely by virtue of being instantly recognizable as a poem, it signals its built-in difference from "normal" language use. It announces that what it says is not all that it says--and yet that extra, surplus "saying" cannot be pinned down or paraphrased, except to say that what it says beyond what it says is that it says something beyond what it says.
To a certain extent, any language that can be in any way characterized as "literary" does this, and to this extent draws on the catachretic equation pattern (alone) = meaning.
Anne writes: "Perhaps poetic language is--in its essence--that language that is made of syntax not symbols, and resembles in its ideal form a pre-representational language similar to that of birds or infants who speak in 'sentences' without knowing the words for things." Poetry, because it is of all literary genres the one most conscious of shape, order, and pattern, is most akin to the first "language" "spoken" by a prehistoric human: a language that must of course have been almost unintelligible to any other human. If other humans hearing that first human language had had the faculty of language themselves, they would have thought, "what the hell does that mean?" as though they were hearing Wittgenstein's speaking lion. But because they did not have language as such, their incomprehension could take no form but the creation of more patterned, catachretic sounds, and all these sounds eventually became conventional, stalely referential, non-catachretic.
John Cage: "Poetry is having nothing to say and saying it."
8 comments:
Kasey, I don't have any Pound immediately here with me, but how do you relate these ideas to his notion that poetry is a combination of sight, sound, and (what's the third word exactly?) intellect, where intellect is simply the conventional notion of meaning as such, whereas the play of image and sound is the way in which poetry encompasses more than just this conventional notion of meaning.
In my basic level poetry classes I go about this in a similar but slightly other way: I suggest that poetry includes image, rhythm, and information, and that only by taking these three things together do we arrive at the "meaning" of the poem, which to my mind is inseparable from the total experience of it, in the same way that interpreting a sheet of lyrics would not be the same as the total experience of a song.
I do understand that these terms raise questions: limitations in the concept of the image, and the slippage between terms like information, meaning, experience and even activity. But it at least gives me a place to start in with the idea that students shouldn't simply try to decipher what the poem "says" but should think about it as a multi-dimensional experience.
If one were to define syntax as, minimally, logical, orderly arrangement or contiguity, then it would seem to me that the term anacoluthon would be more what you're discussing than catachresis, which isn't about *order* per se.
I don't think that's a fair summary of Pound's "logopeia," which he defines as the purely verbal or linguistic effects of poetry, or the "the dance of the intellect among words." Logopeia is not intellectual content, but verbal play--puns, verbal ambiguity, etymological depth, syntactical play, etc... Words used as words.
This logopeia is combined with two other ways of "charging language with meaning." Phanopeia is the visual element, melopeia is sound. But logopeia is emphatically NOT "simply the conventional notion of meaning as such."
So there would be "meaning" in relation to three other elements, sound, meaning, and Poundian logopeia. Maybe that would be for the advanced level poetry classes.
Thanks, Jonathan--I haven't read that definition in years, so I appreciate the clarification. Your version still confuses me though--the linguistic effects of poetry are one thing, and sound is another? I mean, a pun can be either a play on meaning or on sound. and "ambiguity" is an element of meaning. "Words used as words" doesn't quite make sense to me. Because that would include sound, image, and information, wouldn't it?
Well I take logopeia to be all the "wordy," languagey aspects of poetry that aren't phonological, or which aren't only phonological. A choice of a word in an unexpected context, a verbal ambiguity, a syntactic twist... Surely all verbal effects are not effects of sound and image exclusively, so we need that third category. Donne is strong in logopeia. James Wright is not...
Kristine, maybe anacoluthon could be considered a specific form of catachresis--one that manifests itself chiefly syntactically.
Mark and Jonathan, I'm putting my thoughts on your comments in a new post.
One sentence in here doesn't quite jive with the way I've been reading poetry:
'no single word in isolation is poetic (unless some way is found of highlighting the relation of the components of the word to each other, of exaggerating their articulatedness, as in Aram Saroyan's "lighght,"'
I guess I'd say that even in a one word poem that is spelled "correctly", there are still syntactical interactions from within the perceived poem, and from without. Saroyan actually addresses outer syntactical interactions: "An extra ‘gh’ does it. Embossing it does it. Engraving it in stone, and letting the light play off the actual word". The word interacts with the context the poet places it in whether other words form that context or their absence does.
There are also interactions within a word such as the interactions between individual phonemes and morphemes which each come with their own baggage to form peripheral "meanings" which the dictionary can never predict. This is why onomatopoeia works, and also why no one uses the word niggard anymore.
Iain, you're of course quite right (I almost typed "righght").
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