World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  Stendhal put it perfectly:

  The young woman leaned over the counter, which gave her an opportunity to display a superb figure. Julien observed this; all his ideas altered.

  If we travel the axis from raw to cooked, in the phrase of Lévi-Strauss, we carry our carrot out of nature into culture, out of the cave and into the sun, which, like becoming a lawyer in order to be a judge, a candidate and then a mayor, requires a change of status which can be expressed only in big bills. We have appropriated the wild plant, selected the seed, cultivated the root, pulled it from the earth in a moist moment, scraped it clean, chopped it into rounds like the rings of trees, and cooked it slowly with thick chunks of beef; but the carrots we find flavoring our stew are still carrots, however educated the chef has made them. We eat the raw carrot as readily as any other kind, and call both by the same name even when there has been a considerable alteration in appearance. The cold unscraped carrot we planted above the snowman’s mouth, on the other hand, resembles its former self perfectly, rooty all the way, just as the words of poems do; for poetry is not a process of acculturation, but a process of ontological transformation, and essences, not appearances, mere accidents and qualities, are involved. For the cooked carrot there’s a different taste; we can see what’s happened to it; while the bland face of the word remains unruffled regardless of what it’s been forced to say; thus the change (so secret, so internal) needs another signal.

  Fiction has never enjoyed the grand proscenium or gilded frame or pneumatic breasts which plays, painting, women, and poetry possess to announce their nature—poems scattering their words on the page like a burst packet of seed. Fiction has no undermound to raise its sentences into the wind or to shadow the page with a written shout, and this has meant that the number of dunderheads reading Balzac the way they would skim Business Week is considerably larger. Language needs these signals. In most cases, the writer doesn’t respell his words, though Joyce does, and the flavor of Locke and Hobbes depends in part on punctuation. Significantly, the major changes take place through the intervention of that rare reader who perceives the shift, as we do when we contemplate the carrot’s nosey, phallic, icicular shape, and that shift is, again, primarily relational.

  Meanwhile, imagine that John is translating Mary into Japanese.

  And all the elements that make up the figure leave at least some of the relationships that previously defined them, abandon at least some of the functions they formerly had, to create together a novel context from scraps and shards of old ones, to face one another like the coal or carrot in the snowman’s face. As eyes and nose, they need each other; as carrot or coal, they couldn’t care. And this figure we heaved up and patted round and tricked out—it will do nothing from now on but suffer; and we shall photograph our children standing beside it to show how large or small it is/they were.

  Picasso’s snowman we encase in a glass-faced freezer. Why couldn’t he have molded his of Styrofoam like a good fellow? The flux is such a pain.

  3

  We could try to start clean. Suppose, as composers, we had to work with hydraulic sighs and door squeaks, warning whistles, temple bells, and warwhoops. We should have, first of all, to snip these unruly noises from their sources (we hear a stealthy footfall in the floor’s creak), and then remove them from any meanings they might have been assigned (fire, four o’clock, beep beep, watch out!), otherwise we wouldn’t be composing music but creating sound effects. Instead of the Bolero, we’d hear a chorus of heavy breathing. There would be, inevitably, plot.

  There are notes, and there are noises. Notes never occur naturally. God, during His half-dozen days in the sun, did not command a single violin to sing. He made light, land, growing things, fish, animals, man; but nary a painting or a playlet. Let there be tympani. He never ordered it … the insufferable bourgeois.

  When he considers the composer, envy covers Valéry like the skin of a drum. The ultimate in craftsmanship is devoted to fashioning the instruments that resonate the strings; endless hours of practice perfect their playing, and skills are discovered which Nature for centuries let go to waste (the Greeks produced not a single gifted pianist, and for want of a Wurlitzer who knows what Bach lost or we were spared?). In contrast, what must the poem suffer? Everything. Shakespeare, that fortunate man, did not live to hear Hamlet say “words, words, words” with a Southern slur, and what of all those pupils in the Bronx reciting “O my Luv’s like a red, red rose”? or the bacchantes who have lately torn Rimbaud limb from lovely limb?

  Then, too, like that signal I asked for, ceremony surrounds every musical performance. The conductor lifts his baton. A hush falls. Our ears are finely tuned. We are ready to listen … and it isn’t for burglars in the basement. But a book falls open to “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,” and it is: it is quite ordinary; there is the bustle of the bus station, perhaps, the raucous rattle-tattle of children, the slam of pans—we’re here, we’re there, at home or out of doors—and when the book falls open there is no trumpet blast, no one flashes a painting in front of the startled air, nothing whatever happens. We see the words of Wallace Stevens as the poem begins:

  The eye’s plain version is a thing apart,

  the vulgate of experience …

  but we do not begin. We see the words but do we dare perform them? Let them lie there, pepper on the page. Besides, the bus is late.

  Words, lines, not meanings, not communications,

  Dark things without a double, after all …

  and we stumble down the stanzas like unlit stairs—was that our call? why are the people queuing? where’s our case?—until we topple into the blankness of the ended page:

  A great bosom, beard and being, alive with age.

  A word is a wanderer. Except in the most general syntactical sense, it has no home. ‘Rose’ is a name, a noun, an action: where does that put us? somewhere between Utah and the invention of the Ferris wheel. Sounds, however—the notes of music—they are as relational as numbers; they appear in a thoroughly organized auditory space. Even when nothing is playing, even during the dead of night when the clock ticks with trepidation, the great grid is there, measure after measure marked with rests.

  Such is the purity of music, not the purity of poetry, and certainly not the purity of prose (there, where the rose is, blooming beautifully behind its protective, nitrogenic consonant), because fiction is in ever worse shape, contaminated beyond redemption by anyone but a god. The poet struggles to keep his words from saying something, although, like the carrot, they want to go to seed.

  If the composer’s material has already been transformed for the purposes of his art, so that if we woke up to the oboe, it would be that (A on the oboe) we’d wake up to, think what the maker of our snowman (I believe, indeed, that it was I) must do to achieve the same results. So if I succeeded in impressing my work with inner worth the way Yeats did his symbol system, you would have to be reminded that it was not snownoses that were being served for dinner alongside the roast; while Picasso, or while Joyce or Proust, to continue the parallel, if they shaped that frat-house joke, would cause us all to wonder why we were scouring our pots with pubic hair. Meaning depends upon what context is the master, Humpty Dumpty sort of said, and Humpty Dumpty was, as usual, right when revised.

  Here is a summary of the kinds of changes which progressively take place as language is ontologically transformed in the direction of poetry. Everybody knows about them already. It is the consequences that are ignored or denied.

  (1) Adventitious, accidental, and arbitrary properties of words, such as their sound, spelling, visual configuration, length, dentition, social status, etc., become essential; other properties, normally even more problematic and tangential (whether the word is of Anglo-Saxon origin or has Romance roots, and so on; or even whether “sore” is an anagram or that “rose” rhymes with “squoze”), make themselves available. I furnish the following example of an anagrammatic rhyme:

  I once went to bed with a Rose
>
  whose petals I hardly let close.

  Then I said to my florist:

  never mind what the cost is,

  send me a dozen of those.

  The way ordinary ink becomes a sign by coiling about correctly until the insensible suddenly says, “Salamander!” and enters the spirit the way that lizard is alleged to do—safely as moist fingers through flame—that way, the way of the ink, is almost the best example of ontological transformation we have; and it is ironic that poetry works to retransform the word into its ink again, make it neither pure meaning nor matter, but that fabled “third thing” of which poets, alchemists, and Hegel speak.

  (2) Logically necessary connections between concepts are loosened or untied altogether, and meanings which are characteristically associational become strictly implied. In Blake’s poem

  O Rose thou art sick.

  The invisible worm,

  That flies in the night

  In the howling storm:

  Has found out thy bed

  Of crimson joy:

  And his dark secret love

  Does thy life destroy.

  it is still true that the rose is a flower, but we cannot go much further in that direction, the genus is scarcely implicated. In this poem, the rose is a maidenhead (by no means accidentally), and its enemy, the worm that flies in the night, is invoked as much by the implicit rhyme with ‘sperm’ as by the idea of the phallus. The maiden, the flower, and the maiden’s flower, are being addressed simultaneously, and they’re being told that time flies, beauty and youth are fragile, life feeds on life, good attracts evil, and so on … clichés of an unconquerable dullness.

  (3) Grammatical categories are no longer secure. Here is Joyce’s gloss on the inheritance of the meek, the emancipation of the slaves, the freeing of the serfs, and the liberation of women—a passage which like Proust, illustrates everything … almost proves.

  Hightimes is ups be it down into outs according! When there shall be foods for vermin as full as feeds for the fett, eat on earth as there’s hot in oven. When every Klitty of a scolderymeid shall hold every yard-scullion’s right to stimm her uprecht for whimsoever, whether on privates, whather in publics. And when all us romance catholeens shall have ones for all amanseprated. And the world is maidfree. Methanks.

  In some contexts not only are the words put out of their customary place like cats out of doors, the standard syntax of the language is scarcely operating even as an implicit grid. Mallarmé’s famous Un coup de dés is an example.

  (4) The language no longer denotes or names, in the ordinary sense. The carrot does not name a nose. It is one. The word ‘Rose,’ in the following little jingle of Gertrude Stein’s, does not name a girl, it is the girl … a verbal girl to be sure, the best kind.

  My name is Rose.

  My eyes are blue.

  My name is Rose,

  and who are you?

  My name is Rose,

  and when I sing,

  I am Rose

  like anything.

  When a rose has been picked, popped in a vase, peered at, rearranged and watched, the flower has left its function, family, future, far behind; but language, conceived as the servant of our needs, is denied that possiblity. I can hold a stone to the light, set it in silver, let it decorate my finger, even permit it to reveal my marital intentions, but I’m not supposed to walk through Kant as through a cathedral, admiring the beauties of the nave, transept, and choir, curious about the catacombs, dubious about the dome, and positively frightened by the spire. What an affront to the serious purposes of the great man! Isn’t that the conventional opinion? Only the writer who writes to provide such careless strolls is worse, they say. This villain, who puts words together with no intention of stating, hoping, praying, or persuading … only imagining, only creating … is to many immoral, certainly frivolous, a trivial person in a time of trouble (and what time is not?), a parasite upon whatever scrofulous body the body politic possesses at that moment. And roses are intolerably frivolous too, and those who grow them, snowmen and those who raise them up, and drinking songs and drinking, and every activity performed for its own inherent worth.

  (5) Verse forms, rhyme schemes, metrical devices, and so on, are as peculiar to poetry as the scale is to music. No doubt, in early oral cultures, they had an important mnemonic function. Now, though of course they do help to make poetry memorable, they have become almost as arbitrary and remote from life, meaning, and any useful exercise of mind as the sounds of words themselves. I cannot see any significant connection between the sonnet and its favorite subject, love (have you noticed anything fourteen-line-ish about it?), whereas the tabular structure of a tide table immediately furnishes its sufficient reason. These poem patterns are like hurdles. Low or high, they do define the race; but there might easily be others: a leapfrog relay, or the hundred-meter cartwheel. In any case, the limerick, the villanelle, respetto, do not suffer transformation. They are already where they need to be, but the patterns they insist on require many of the changes I’ve suggested occur.

  (6) The language of literature does not disappear like steaming breath or memos in the shredder, nor is it preserved for patriotic purposes (“Give me liberty, or give me death!”), out of religious awe, like Deuteronomy, or historical reverence, like Washington’s Farewell Address. “Come live with me and be my love” is not an invitation. Nor is Raleigh’s reply a real one. The text is surely not sacred, and, though utopian, unpolitical. Its mode is that of blandishment and seduction, but it is addressed to no one, all sexes are equally charmed. The poem is not bent on getting anyone to bed. It certainly contains no truths, pretends to none, and will in no way ennoble its reader. And how much wisdom you expect to find as you move along from Marlowe to Shakespeare (“Where the bee sucks, there suck I”), and thence to Donne and Milton, will depend on how foolish, unreflective, or unread you are.

  It was this quality of maintaining itself in consciousness, of requiring continued repetition, of returning attention over and over again to itself like a mirror that will not allow reflections to escape its surface, that Valèry found most significant and valued most in every art. All the transformations I’ve talked about have this ultimate integrity in mind; for against what do the great lines of poetry reverberate, if not the resoundings of other lines?

  (7) I said that the poet struggles to keep his words from saying something, and as artists we all struggle to be poets. Yet what does this come to? Does it really mean that poems can’t speak? that they are gagged or threatened? Both the snowman and the daffodil can measure spring; my ring says I’m engaged or a graduate of the class of ’43, and we all know about the last rose of summer. The true muteness of any expression can be measured by the degree to which the justification of the symbol combinations comes to rest within the expression itself, just as the reason for putting a coffin in the ground is that there’s a body in it. If I cry “Fire!” we look around and sniff for smoke. If I make a promise or hold a belief or adopt a faith, where is the profit? If I make an assertion, what is the truth? If I draw a conclusion, where are the premises, what is their ordering, how goes the proof? One could continue this catechism for all the conditions that bring any speech or piece of writing into existence, graffiti included, common prayers a specialty of the house. So what justifies the snowman? symbolism? photos of the children? its service as a slushclock?… fun. Building a bigger snowman than my neighbor might explain my exertions, but it wouldn’t vindicate them, and of course most of our actions have little clearance from the gods. Like light under a door, we do them for the thickest of causes and the thinnest of reasons.

  We must not be misled by the ubiquitous presence of causes like bugs at a picnic. A hundred thousand factors, including evidence, may lead a man to his beliefs; however, for their scientific adequacy, only the evidence matters. Similarly, the causes of the composition of Finnegans Wake might mount into the millions, matching the misprints, but only its own inner constitution (its radiance, whole
ness, clarity) will guarantee its right to be read, to be repeated, praised, and pondered; without further service or apology to confront our consciousness with an overwhelming completeness, an utterness a god would bite its lip to see, and which, as those same gods once were, totally entitles it to be.

  The responsibility of any science, any pure pursuit, is ultimately to itself, and on this point physics, philosophy, and poetry unite with Satan in their determination not to serve. Any end is higher than utility, when ends are up.

  We can approach the problem from yet another direction. We are tiresomely familiar in philosophy with the distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions, and one way of describing the difference between them depends upon the kind of things one would do to justify forming the propositions in the first place. The presence of the predicate, in an analytic proposition, is justified (1) by grammatical form, and (2) by the appearance of that predicate in the definition of the subject term. Such expressions (“A bird is an English chick”; “A chick is an American doll”; “A doll is a man-made plaything”) can be said to be equivalences or exfoliations of meaning rather than statements of fact (as “The price of a proper plaything is a hundred bucks a night”). In the latter case we justify the presence of the money in the predicate by going to the unseemly world outside the judgment and finding the corresponding relation. Actually, as Plato argued, analytic judgments refer to an organized system of concepts, and analytic judgments are true when they reflect that system correctly.