Phillip Beaufoy provides the motto for this book. At one point in Joyce’s Ulysses he levels an accusation against the unfairly maligned Leopold Bloom, “You’re too beastly awfully weird for words!” (459). Me, too! I confess. This leads to problems for both of us, of course. But it is an awfully good motto, despite the unfortunate consequences of its truth: linguistic obsession, hyper-sensitivity, paranoia, extravagance, inordinance. This book is written out of an attempt to show the virtues of these unfortunate qualities, to champion a weirdness for words as an ethos of life.
I know, however, that not everyone is weird for words. It is a vocation for some, but not for all. On the other hand, we are all weird with words, whether we admit it or not. We are intimate with words: our thoughts are involuted with them, our senses of ourselves cast with them, the world infused with them. We are all—you are, I am—infested with language—its seductions and deformations, its powers and weaknesses. And so we corrupt words with wit and folly; or we are profligate with them in our carelessness, content to clutch at whatever phrases come to hand; or we become silent and austere, if not always with precision, often with suspicion of talk and pretension. Our dispositions with words are many and convoluted, but they are not all equally good or bad. Literature at least offers us exempla for our ways of living with words, and so our reading of literary art should constitute a confrontation with the words by which we make sense of our lives, the words by which we make sense of others, with how things are for some of us and also for all of us.
However you live with them, you do not face words one by one, but you find them and they approach you in various groups, as particular objects—as sentences, poems, stories, and fictions. These are four of the most important objects made of words. They form the foundations of literary study and of human life. To understand what they are, how they work, and how we relate to them provides an introduction to how and why literature matters and always will matter.
This book consists of a set of interrelated studies concerning these four essential objects of literature—sentences, poems, stories, and fictions. Part of the point of these studies is to understand to what degree these objects are actually made of words. And to understand to what degree we are.
Our lives, our thoughts, and our sense of everything are involuted with words. We assert or discover meanings by means of what we take as meaningful. My goal is to map this involuted word-world and our word-selves, paying special attention to those word-objects that reveal the odd intimacy we have with language. The central feature on this map, of course, will be poems, which are not, as I will argue, logical objects in the way that sentences and fictions are. They are instead puzzles of a sort that are surprisingly hard to resolve. Sentences and fictions, as kinds of things, can give us clear compass-bearings in the mapping of the word-world, despite their own deep strangeness. Poems, on the other hand, will create disorienting storms that will expose landscapes of profound importance for our human bearing.
And what about stories? They are the primary vehicles for our ethical understanding. They are shaped by words, but also by much else, including the nature of action and our various modes of practical reasoning. They require special attention. They are bound up, for example, with what I would call descriptive reasoning. That is something to explore through a different set of writings. Stories, however, will matter in the writings I include here, but primarily as contexts through which poems can emerge by means of words. My primary concern will be poems.
Poems offer an intricate simplicity. They are odd, peculiar things. Odd and peculiar because particular. At least that is the story: poems are peculiar because they are so particular. If this is true, then when we change the words of a poem or shift their order, we make a new poem. Poems would seem to be radically and essentially defined by their words. Ordinary, everyday sentences, on the other hand, are not defined by their words in this way, but by the thoughts they express. We say something one way, then we say it in another, trying to get it right or trying to discover what we mean. In our ordinary lives with language, what we say is not (always) equivalent to what we mean. And once we understand what someone else means, we often forget what was said and how it was said; it is the meaning that matters (or the uptake of what we take a sentence to imply). Sentences dissolve in our grasping of them. Poems are not like that. We may never know what a poem means, and yet we can be held by its particular words. With poems, what is said (or written) does not dissolve in what is meant. A poem seems bound tightly to the particularity of its words.
But how tightly bound? This book has evolved out of that question. One of the chapters to follow addresses the problem directly, asking—Is a Poem the Same as its Words? Or more precisely: Are poems equivalent to the words of which they seem to be made? My answer is no, they are not. A lot of surprising things follow from this conclusion, surprising not only for poems, but for ourselves as language users.
I explore these surprising things by asking further questions. Do poems have something in common? Is there a special poetic sense? How can we give voice to the poetry of poetry? Where is the sense in a poem? If a poem is not particular, what is it? Each question exposes some oddity in the peculiar particularity of poems. A pattern emerges: the more particular we attempt to make a poem the more it escapes into analogy and otherness. The paths of escape, however, are various and weird, because those paths involve us and our involuted ways with words. There is no reading a poem that is not also a reading of the kind of thing a poem is.
Poems are particularities that fail to be particular, because they are in some sense not their words. A poem is elsewhere and yet bound to the words by which it is manifest. We, human beings, are like that too—manifest in our flesh and in what is visible and yet elsewhere and other than that. I am in my face, but not; I am in my words, but not; I am in my gestures, but not. Poems are symptoms of our own particularity and dispersal. If we understand how a poem is particular and how it is not, we will find the mesh by which we catch ourselves in what is like us, but not.
As I mentioned, poems are odd things. They have no necessary form. They can be doubted out of existence. ‘That is no poem,’ someone says with disdain, ‘those words are mere noise.’ ‘Of course not,’ I say, ‘it is certainly a poem. Can’t you hear its music?’ This appeal is not likely to work, since the first claim by the disdainful disbeliever in my poem is that it is noise. ‘Listen,’ I say, ‘I will read it to you and prove to you it’s a poem.’ So I read it and then look up: ‘Don’t you see?,’ I say, ‘It’s a poem.’ ‘No, no, I don’t hear it. Where is the poetry in these words?’ I start to explicate its sense, describe its rhetorical effects, offer an aesthetic justification of its particularity. You say, ‘I don’t feel it. Sorry, I just don’t.’ In frustration, I say, ‘Just listen,’ and I begin to recite the poem again. I read the words into a particular tone. You hear it. ‘It is a poem!’, you exclaim. The poem is revealed—but where? If the poem is revealed by my tone of voice in reading, then is that where the poem is, in the tones of my reading, in the art of my voice? If so, might we in the spirit of David Hume, then suggest that a poem is nothing more than “a peculiar sentiment, or lively conception produced by habit” (A, 657)? Of course, one can give another account of belief—but a belief that makes something through a tone of voice, seems a good example of a lively conception producing a habit, in this case, a habit of calling some things poems and other things laundry lists.
What is the poem that we might hear or find in our voice, in our tone with words? Poems, in a way very similar to the words of which they seem to be made, present us with a particular problem—in both cases there is something manifest by means of shapes and sound—but what is manifest seems not equivalent to the means of manifestation, but is nevertheless radically dependent on them. A number of important things are like this. Time is not the same as change and yet without change it would not be manifest. Death is not the same as the dead, but what else is it? To say death does not exist, seems both right and wrong. Death is not a state or a thing, but it is shown by the dead who are parodies of the living they once were. We imagine we have a mind, but all we can actually say is that we have a brain and behaviors we take as mental, suggesting something called a mind. This is not a list that is easy to digest, but it gives me a target: things that radically depend on their means of manifestation, but that are not reducible or equivalent to those means. This is not a definition, but a description meant to capture something important about these examples: mind, time, death, words and poems. As you see a poem, as a kind of thing, is cousin to some strange creatures.
The studies that follow do not form a treatise or encyclopedia. Founded on exploration, they are reports from amidst the jungle of language, except this jungle is constituted to a large degree by these word-objects, a jungle of objects that do not look like objects. And we are all inside and outside this jungle and these objects. It’s a dream jungle. This is what makes the task of exploration so difficult, requiring various disciplines of thought and writing. It is also what makes the task so essential and important. We continually lose and find ourselves amidst and in these word-objects. We are odd creatures living word-inflected lives. This reminds me of the Cheshire Cat, with its detachable smile. Our words are like the Cheshire Cat’s teeth, and our sentences are like its smile. We, ourselves, are like the Cat, often elsewhere from our words and yet also there, with our left behind smiling sentences.
We all have certain attitudes and dispositions towards words. I can for example believe or not believe some particular statement: to take a stance of belief towards a particular set of words. But more broadly, I can love words. I can believe in them, as if they were talismans or portents or pearls; and I can be careless with them, blunt and sloppy, often to the point of stammering or indifference. I can fear words, disdain them, fetishize or worship them. For many, their dispositions towards words are casual and desultory. For others, delineations of phrase and tone become obsessive. And thus, some find their fate always with words, strung between wild faith and anxious suspicion. It is not the only way to live, but if it is your way, it is a life of distinctions, descriptions, trust, mistrust, and linguistic distress. It is my life. Maybe, it is yours.
