Finding a Form (46 page)

In any case, something interesting happens when we examine an extended text from the point of view of these distinctions.
Madame Bovary
, for instance, has been translated into many languages, but does this feat mean there is a Pure, un-French
Madame B
, one beyond any ordinary verbal exactness or lyrical invention? Clearly
Madame Bovary
is confined to its language, and that language is not merely French in some broad, undifferentiated sense, but is Flaubert’s so particularly that no other hand could have handled the studied pen of its composition. In short, as we rose, somewhat dubiously, from the token to the Pure Type, we now, more securely, mark the descent from a general language like French to the specific style of an artist like Flaubert or Proust. With their native tongue they speak a personal language, and may even, as in the case of Henry James, have a late as well as an early phase.

They achieve this individuality of style, as we shall see, by being intensely concerned with the materiality of the token, whether of word or sentence form or larger rhetorical scheme, although a text may be notable for its ideas or particular subject matter as well. In doing so, they defy the idea that the relation between token and
type is purely arbitrary. By implication, they deny that a book only hauls its passengers.

Words really haven’t an independent life. They occupy no single location. They are foci for relations. Imagine an asterisk made by innumerable but inexactly crisscrossing lines: that’s one image of the word. Tokens take on meanings as well as contribute their own by the way they enter, then operate in and exit from, contexts. The Pure Type may sit like a sage on its mountaintop, pretending it is a Holy Thing, but the Language Type is dependent in great part upon the history of use that all its tokens have, for the oddity is that if the word is not the token, it is nevertheless the token that does the word’s work; that suffers age and becomes archaic; that undergoes changes, usually vulgar, in its meaning and even grammatical condition; that finds itself, if highborn, among hoi polloi or other ruck, if an immigrant, suddenly surrounded by the finest families, or rudely plopped into metaphors, hot as pots of wash, there to be stained by the dyes of strangers.

If the word is an accretion formed from its history of use, then when it scrapes against another word, it begins to shave the consequences of past times and frequent occasions from its companion, as well as being shorn itself. We can imagine contexts which aim to reduce the ambiguous and rich vagueness of language and make each employed term mean and do one and only one thing (Gertrude Stein says she aimed at this effect for a time, and insisted that when words were so primly used, they became nearly unrecognizable); and there are certainly others whose hope is to employ the entire range of any word’s possibilities, omitting not even its often forgotten roots (as Joyce does in
Finnegans Wake
). The same token can indeed serve many words, so that, while the word “steep,” set down alongside the word “bank,” will withdraw a few meanings from use, it may take an adjective like “muddy” to force the other “banks” to fail. Differentiation and determination are the goals of great writing: words so cemented in their sentential place they have no synonyms, terms so reduced to single tokens they
lose their generality; they survive only where they are, the same size as their space, buried words like buried men:

All our lines of language are like the rope in a tug of war: their referential character pulls them one way, in the direction of things and the material world, where “buried men” are covered corpses, no otherwise than fossil bones; while the conceptual side of our sentences drags them toward a realm of abstraction and considers them in their relation to other ideas: those, first of all, that define terms and tell us most matter-of-factly what it is to be buried, but only word for word; secondly, associations that have been picked up over time and use, like dust on travel clothes, and which shadow each essential sense to suggest, in this case, that death in one life is life in another; and, thirdly, those connections our own memories make—for instance, if these lines remind us of a few of Edwin Muir’s, and link us suddenly with a land frozen into flooring, a place whose planks are crossed, let’s say, by a miller’s daughter one cold winter’s day, in another country and in another poem, and where the implications for the buried are quite otherwise than those suggested by Yeats.

Our own awareness, too, is always being drawn toward its objects, as if it were being sung to by sirens, at the same time that it’s
withdrawing, in the company of the cautious self-regarding self, into the safe citadel of the head; unless, of course, desire is doing the driving, for then the same sensation that is sharply focused on the being of another (an exposed chest, a piece of moist cake) will find itself inside of hunger’s stomach.

These brief considerations should be sufficient to suggest that the word may be troubled by the same ontological problems which plagued Descartes (and all of us who inherited his hobbies): there are two poles to the person which are pulling the person apart, namely mind—meaning and mathematics—inside the circle of the self, and body—spatial location and mechanics—within the determined realm of things. A book is such a bodied mind. Descartes described these spheres (in the way, it seemed to him, accuracy required) as so separate, so alien from each other (for consciousness is no-thing, is no-where, and its reasoning powers, if we confine ourselves to those, are correctly exercised in free souls like ourselves in precisely the same way, just as mathematical proofs proceed, not in consequence of coercion, but from rational rule; whereas matter is unfree, fixed, almost entirely engaged in occupancy, and a tribute to cause and effect)—indeed, as so opposed in every character and quality—that we might naturally wonder how self and world could combine, meet, or merely hail each other if they are at such ontological odds; and we have seen, as I have said, how bodylike the book is, how mindlike the text, and if Descartes’s critics complained that he had made of us a ghost in a machine, we might now understand the text as thought slipped warmly between cold sheets, elusive as a spirit, since its message cannot be injured by ripping up its pages or destroyed by burning its book. Dog-earing can do no damage to the significance of the sign, according to the Cartesian division; nor can the cruel reader’s highlight pen clarify obscurity, a check mark change a stress, or an underline italicize a rhyme. This bifurcation of reality can be made persuasive, yet does our experience allow us to believe it?

Of course we continue to call them copies, as if there were an exemplar still and every book were but a vassal of its Lord, an
Adam to its Maker. This medieval scheme is gone; nor are books copied piecemeal anymore, the way translators seize on a huge work of Herman Wouk’s, turning it, chapter by chapter, into several forms of Japanese; rather, the book is an object of mass production like a car (there is no first Ford), and both language and printing confer upon it a redoubtable generality to accompany its spiritual sameness. Like citizens in our country, all copies are truly equal, although this one, signed by the author, is somewhat more valuable; and this one, from the original edition, is to be preferred to all subsequent impressions; and this one, bound beautifully and illustrated by Picasso, is priceless (see, it’s wrapped in tissue); and this one, dressed in vulgar colors and pretending to be a bosom, not a book, like a whore flaunting its contents while ashamed of its center, asks to be received as nothing but an object, a commodity for learning or for leisure use, certainly not as a holy vessel, a container of consciousness, but instead as a disposable duplicate, a carbonless copy, another dollar bill, and not as a repository for moments of awareness, for passages of thought—states which, we prefer to believe, make us most distinctly us.

Descartes endeavored (it was a futile try) to find a meeting point for mind and matter, a place where they might transact some business, but consciousness could not be moored to a material mast like some dirigible, and his famous gland could not reside in both realms at once, or be a third thing, neither one nor tuther, not with realities so completely contrary. Yet if he had looked inside his
Cogito
instead of pursuing its
ergo
to its
sum
, he would have found the simple, unassuming token, made of meaningless ink as its page is of flattened fibers, to which, in a formal yet relaxed way, were related both a referent in the world and a meaning in the mind. It was not that world; it was not that mind. Both had to happen along and find their union in the awareness of the reader.

Normally, we are supposed to say farewell to the page even as we look, to see past the cut of the type, hear beyond the shape of the sound, feel more than the heft of the book, to hear the bird sing whose name has been invoked, and think of love being made
through the length of the night if the bird’s name is the nightingale; but when the book itself has the beauty of the bird, and the words do their own singing; when the token is treated as if it, not some Divine intention, was holy and had power; when the bird itself is figured in the margins as though that whiteness were a moon-bleached bough and the nearby type the leaves it trembles; and when indigo turbans or vermilion feathers are, with jasmines, pictured so perfectly that touch falls in love with the finger, eyes light, and nostrils flare; when illustrations refuse to illustrate but instead suggest the inside of the reader’s head, where a consciousness is being constructed; then the nature of the simple sign is being vigorously denied, and the scene or line or brief rendition is being treated like a thing itself, returning the attention again and again to its qualities and its compositon.

What is this as-if “if”? It is as if the tokens were rebelling against their simple dispensable utilitarian status; it is as if they were appealing to the meanings they ostensibly bear by saying, “Listen, hear how all of me helps you, for I won’t let you merely declare your intention to return to a place and a time when you saw the moor-cock amorous with his hen and held your own love fast in tribute to him, but I shall insist that my very special music become meaning too, so that none of me, not a syllable of my substance, shall be left behind like an insignificant servant, because, as you can hear and see and feel, I am universal too, I am mind, and have ideal connections.”

Yet it is only a longstanding philosophical prejudice to insist on the superiority of what are called the “higher” abstract general things, for they feel truly ghostly, orphaned, without even a heaven to make a shining mark on, and beseech the material world to give them a worthy home, a residence they may animate and make worthwhile; they long to be some-thing, to be some-place, to know the solidity and slow change of primal stuff, so they—these ideas, these designs—will rush into the arms of Thomas Hardy’s lines and, instead of passing away into one realm or other, will remain and be repeated by us, revisited as the poet revisits that meadow full of springtime: “I shall go where went I when.” Like a kite, the poem rises on the wind and longs to be off, yet the line holds, held by the page—though pulling to be away, required to remain.

This stanza of Auden’s describing “Brussels in Winter” discloses what rhymes do: they mate; they mate meanings on the basis of a common matter. On the basis of an accidental resemblance argue common blood. Through this absurd connection, they then claim equivalent eloquence for the mute as for the vocal.

Rows of words become the frozen scene, while the scene is but the sounds the syllables align.

Rhymes ball their signs like snow, then throw for fun the hard-packed contents of the fist at the unwary backside of a friend, who will nonetheless laugh when he receives the blow.

It was Emerson who wrote:

The stone is carved by the consciousness of the carver. That way consciousness achieves the dignity of place, and the stone overcomes its cold materiality and touches spirit.

The oscillation of interest between “thing” and “thought” inside the sign is complemented by a similar vibration in consciousness, inasmuch as we are eager to lose ourselves in our experience, enjoy what Nietzsche called a Dionysian drunkenness, and become one with what we know; but we are also anxious to withdraw, observe ourselves observing, and dwell in what Nietzsche said was a dream state but I prefer to imagine is made of the play of the mind, an Apollonian detachment, the cool of the critical as it collects its thoughts within the theater of the head.