clerisy heresy

Thoughts spurred by reading Madame Bovary- especially the idea of "le mot juste"- which has been very influential in my own attempts at writing. The effect and importance of the word …..I found that M. Bovary is an amazing crystallization of language's intrusion into our literary-crude world, but also it is literature's best vivisection of limerance.


This weekend I had been trying to think of what I thought my response would be to the idea of a spectral poetics- presented on this blog-


This is what he writes:
I think poetry (in general) is the house, the thing that gets occupied or haunted. And form or style is the vehicle, or the spectre, depending on your perspective and the age in which you live. To put it differently: poetry is an institution that we as a culture construct over time. We decide things like, “yes, this poem moves us,” or, “this poem is totally forgettable.” The establishment (academics, publishers, etc) decide a lot of that for us, but we have a say in what goes into the walls of that house too.
But over the centuries, things changed in the English-speaking world - we had a couple of nasty wars that broke our romantic ideals, or at least permanently altered them. Those romantic ideals - true love, an ordered universe, “civilized” behavior - were closely associated with things like the sonnet, the villanelle, the vocative O (”O Titus!”). We rebelled against those things - forms and styles - and gave birth to free verse. Once upon a time, the sonnet was the vehicle … now it’s the ghost. But the ghost and vehicle occupy the same house, right along with us.
I could be wrong about all of this, you know.



And this is what I thought: please forgive my hasty thoughts, however, as I am not trained in this process, I have also not been thinking about this idea for awhile. Mostly these thought are an intuitive response.

Vehicle, house- these are both metaphors which work as long as the construct of the metaphor is consistent. We are haunted by the debris of language's past meanings and uses* as language moves through time, it is a very flexible tool that can adapt to the changing demands of the user.

And many things have changed; not only socio-political/ economic, but philosophical, psychological understandings have (not totally usurped) at least challenged the romantic ideals of the individual as well as changes in technology and science. A cultural product (a poem in this case) is only as relevant to an audience as long as it speaks and addresses the concerns, desires and needs of that audience. The landscape of language has been altered so dramatically that poetry forms, like the sonnet, no longer correspond to the contemporary reader. These forms have been replaced more effectively with other types of cultural production- film, pop music, etc.

So perhaps the question is where does poetry fit in the contemporary world? I guess this is what some theses are about. I personally don't know.


* some idea of language through time- written by Mic Gendreau-
Some ideas from this morning, which will hopefully point to better ideas:

Parataxis, dynamic synchronism MLG 22 Dec 2004

Jakobson split from Saussure regarding the concepts of static synchrony and diachrony. He basically disagrees that language (or, its constituents, phonology, grammar, typology) can be examined as a present and static concept. He combines the concepts into a “dynamic synchrony.” That is, the various elements of a time-variant language exist simultaneously. (Similarly, spatial variants coexist.) Thus, we have a common form of English, but which coexists with various still comprehensible archaisms.

When the split occurred, it may have seemed more radical that it does today. We have the benefit of similar researches in other sciences, especially fuzzy set theory, the uncertainty principle, and the like, which consider the feature selection necessary to partition and examine a single aspect of a gestalt to be essentially an interference with the subject to some degree. This is akin to solving and equation by linearizing it, neglecting the messier components that one hopes will have less significance in the results.

What is interesting about this is, that if you go back far (or wide) enough, an individual, depending on their knowledge, might encounter a form of English that is no longer comprehensible. I am thinking of the variances in Old English and the versions that preceded it, in my own case.

Now, we consider this with respect to a language or form of communication that is paratactic, containing preverbal or extra-verbal elements. Paratactic communication is remarkably (and perhaps by definition) difficult to analyze or even “know” in a regular way. Perhaps an element of this is the extreme diachronic density of the information. For example, whatever the informational limits an individual might have of the syntactic language she or he uses, the limits are likely to extend much farther back in time and scope for a preverbal language. For example, a 1,500 year old poem heard in Latin (by me) might contain very little meaningful semantic information, but if read correctly, contain a significant amount or paratactic (or at least preverbal, or at least “sonic”) information. I can presumably process and “understand” or in some way “know” preverbal information extending back to the dawn of communication and beyond, but the ancient diachronous elements of English or French that I am able to use are much more recent and thus, more meager.