1. Lexis Complexes and Intentions in Tension
A bon entendeur ne faut qu'une parole."Lexis" transliterates the Greek word [Greek here] , or "speech," "diction, style," and "a single word or phrase." The word first appears outside its mother tongue in late Latin, though it could hardly thrive there in the shadow of the crucial Latin word lex, "law." English also deferred lexis before the ongoing powerful associations of the Latin word, as embodied, for instance, in the 1644 title, Lex Rex, but the growing concern for "lexicons" and "lexicographers" (first OED citations are 1603 and 1658) kept the Greek root in circulation. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, lexis found itself fully lexicalized in English, in part, perhaps, to mark a contrast to the more evidently vocal root of "vocabulary" and "diction." Today, the lex of law-Latin grows more antique, and the associations of "law" and "word" meet upon more equal terms, as in the legal data base and retrieval system LEXIS®.(1)
--Rabelais"Complex" derives from the Latin verb complector (past participle, complexus), "to embrace," "to grasp," "to encircle": Ovid describes the merging Hermaphroditus and Salmacis as knit conplexu tenaci, "in a tight embrace" (Metamorphoses 4.377). Just as with the Old English "fathom," the Latin verb also means "to embrace something intellectually," and, a result of such comprehension, "to express or explain a multitude of objects," "to sum up." The echo of complico, "to fold together" complicates the meaning of the word: a complex comprehends something already plaited or intertwined. Early in the twentieth century, "complex" gained another particular reference, owing to C. G. Jung's use of the term to denominate the "special psychic contents" or "secondary mind" ("Complexes" 599, 601) which he identified as the cause of certain disturbances in subjects' responses to the word association experiments he began in 1902. The "complex" linked together various private ideas with a common emotional tone, and, being "relatively independent," could drive "at certain intentions ... contrary to the conscious intentions of the individual" ("Complexes" 601). An approving Freud related in a 1906 article specifically conscious of lexis and lex ("Psycho-Analysis and the Establishment of the Facts in Legal Proceedings") that
the connection between the stimulus-word and the reaction-word could not be one of chance, but must be determined by a pre-existing group of ideas in the mind of the person reacting.Eight years later, directly after the split between the two analysts, Freud regarded "complex" more critically as "a convenient and often indispensable term for summing up a psychological state descriptively. None of the other terms coined by psycho-analysis for its own needs has achieved such widespread popularity or been so misapplied" ("History" 313); Jung, however, continued to maintain that "[t]he via regia to the unconscious ... is not the dream, as [Freud] thought, but the complex" ("Complex Theory" 101).
It has become customary to call a group of ideas of this kind, having an influence on the reaction to the stimulus-word, a `complex'. The influence works either by the stimulus-word actually touching a complex directly or by the complex succeeding in getting into touch with the word by intermediate links. (14).Freud had been thoroughly primed to follow a connection between lexis and complex. In Studies in Hysteria (1895) he had come upon "the genesis of hysterical symptoms through symbolization by means of a verbal expression" (179) in cases like that of "Elisabeth von R.", whose facial neuralgia was related to a much earlier traumatic conversation with her husband and an insult which "`was like a slap in the face'" (178). Another case turned on "the emergence of isolated key-words" which Freud and his patient had "to work into sentences" (276) which proved to articulate a childhood sexual trauma. Two years later Freud states in a letter that he has
found confirmation that the locality at which the repressed breaks through is the word presentation and not the concept attached to it. (More precisely, the word memory.) Hence the most disparate things are readily united as an obsessional idea under a single word with multiple meanings. The tendency toward breaking through makes use of these ambiguities as though it were killing several flies at one blow. (Letters 287)The obsessional ideas, he adds, "frequently are clothed in a characteristic verbal vagueness in order to permit such multiple deployment" (288). He imagines the thought content behind such words as corresponding "to a ramifying system of lines and more particularly to a converging one": the meeting of two or "often" more threads determines (or, "overdetermines") a nodal point as, for instance, a "symptom"--which might itself be "an isolated word" or apparently "meaningless series of words" (Studies 290, 276).Reporting the case of an obsessional patient whose breakdown was triggered by hearing the account of a torture with rats, Freud characterizes the story itself as a "complex stimulus-word" to which the patient reacted with "his obsessional idea" ("Notes" 353). Indeed, classification of the "Rat Man"'s pathology required Freud's identifying a series of "verbal bridges" in "the rat delirium" which linked the stimulus to the patient's investment not only in the word Ratten ("rats"), but also Raten ("installments"--as in the payments for this therapy in words), Spielratte ("gambler"-- evoking his shame over his father's gambling debt), and heiraten ("to marry"--reflecting an ongoing conflict). Such patients, writes Freud, "do not know the wording of their own obsessional ideas" (359) and in the "secondary defensive struggle" against their unwanted thoughts generate "deliria" or seemingly incoherent bits of narrative, word play, and injunctions in order both to struggle with and to maintain their pathology. The obsession, writes Freud, can be "protected" by "indefinite or ambiguous wording," and "[a]fter being misunderstood, the wording may find its way into the patient's `deliria'" which "constantly tend to form new connections with that part of the matter and wording of the obsession which is not present in consciousness" (382).
The "rat obsession" might also be seen as an instance of the unconscious dynamic of "condensation" in the way it constitutes an abridged translation of the patient's anal- erotic and oedipal conflict. "Condensation," or Verdichtung in German, can suggest the dynamic of poetic work through its homophonic connection to Dichtung ("poetry," "fiction") and the thought that, for Freud, "[t]he work of condensation in dreams is seen at its clearest when it handles words and names" (Interpretation 330). It is under the heading of Verdichtung in The Interpretation of Dreams that Freud dwells on what he now calls the "Knotenpunkt," the knot or nodal point or "switch word" at which, in which, different themes and interpretations intersect and overlap. The nodal point is a kind of revolving door--or complex gate--which multiple, perhaps conflicting motivations each utilizes in reaching expression, even while maintaining, through such communal use, an appearance of collective unity or identity. Concluding the discussion of his "Dream of the Botanical Monograph" Freud reflects that
the elements "botanical" and "monograph" found their way into the content of the dream because they possessed copious contacts with the majority of the dream-thoughts, because, that is to say, they constituted "nodal points" upon which a great number of dream-thoughts converged, and because they had several meanings in connection with the interpretation of the dream. (317-18)These elements, he continues, turn out to have been "overdetermined," or "represented in the dream-thoughts many times over" (318). Regarding another dream and its highlighted neologism "tutelrein," Freud finds that the word "could be analyzed in three directions, and led in that way to three of the subjects represented in the dream- thoughts" (332). These subjects included "a legal term for `guardianship'" ("Tutel"), "a vulgar term for a woman's breast" ("`Tutel' (or possibly `Tuttel')"), and the concluding portion "rein" ("clean"), which by analogy with another compound suggested "zimmerrein" or "house-trained," and, "in addition, sounded very much like the name of a member of the dreamer's family" (332). A more succinct example, based this time on elision, comes in Freud's comment regarding "the meaning which references to Italy seem to have had in the dreams of a woman patient who had never visited that lovely country: `gen Italien [to Italy]'--`Genitalien [genitals]'" (265).In Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, Freud identifies the process of condensation as the principle technique of verbal "witz" and regards its production of "multiple use of the same material, play upon words, and similarity of sound" as intending to obtain pleasure in the "localized economy" of the words--something "which had been permitted at the stage of play but had been dammed up by rational criticism in the course of intellectual development" (169). Such condensations, he adds, "arise automatically ... during the thought-processes in the unconscious" (ibid.), that is to say, during the never-sleeping "unconscious thought- processes ... produced in early childhood," that period of life "in which we were accustomed to deal with our psychical work in general with a small expenditure of energy" (171, 236). Jokes, puns, and condensations are all marked by a concern for economy, "a tendency to compression, or rather to saving", and Freud punctuates the discussion of such frugal oration by quoting Hamlet's "`Thrift, thrift, Horatio!'" (42). This notion of economic motivation can be related directly to the poetic function of language characterized by Roman Jakobson as the projection of the "principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination, so that similarity becomes the constitutive device of the sequence" (358).
One of Jakobson's examples is the memorable political slogan of the 1950s in which the selected or intended sentiment "I admire Eisenhower" or "Vote for Dwight" is made "poetic" by the projection of the principle of equivalence (various possible forms of the content) into the choice of sounds/words actually combined to derive the exemplar of similarity, "I LIKE IKE." Jakobson suggests that the inclusion of "Ike" in "like" offers a "paronomastic image of a feeling which totally envelops its object," while the inclusion of "I" in "Ike" supplies a "paronomastic image of the loving subject enveloped by the beloved object" (357).(2) The point is that the jingle, with its paronomasias or puns, is more highly motivated than other slogans one might construct, as its popularity proved (a bon mot has mo'-mot-motivation). Its effectiveness is overdetermined by the declarative import, the communally sanctioned projective identification (Ike [daddy] and I are one), and also by the childlike pleasure in the chiming words which at once screens and prepares that identification--makes the speaker a tike, so to speak. The economy of the formulation satisfies regressive impulses and, what amounts to the same thing, resistance in the face of logical, demanding discourse (reasons why one supports Ike). The lexis complex simplifies complex logos, and this reduction or economizing or reformatting or "data compression" can be seen as the knowledgeable making-- poesis--behind "the poetic function."
For another example, consider the successful advertising campaign of the early 1980s which asked "Where's the beef?" Since the customer's complaint or belief or "beef" supposedly concerned the lack of real meat or "beef" in the competition's burger patty, one could unpack the three words as "Here's my beef, which is, where's your beef?" There is also, one supposes, an element of suggestion which prompts the audience to salivate and wonder where to buy some beefburgers, and to decide at the same time certainly not to bother with those places which leave one asking "Where's the beef?" From another angle, one might point to an abundance of repressed, infantile anger and hostility to account for popular identification with such aggressive questioning, and speculate that the potential hazards and guilt accompanying such self-assertion dictated the advertiser's creating a physically non- threatening caricature old lady as the speaker. The history of these two slogans also suggests that the pleasure or interest they convey, as with jokes, lasts only as long as the material is tightly packed and unfamiliar. The delight they activate is bound up in experiencing the packed or overdetermined nature of their message, but not in a fully conscious manner--once the material appears more clearly to consciousness, either through analysis or saturation, its pleasure evaporates. Furthermore, in the case of these slogans, the message can easily become conscious because it is carefully plotted (test-marketing, audience response surveys, etc.)--as Jakobson says of "I like Ike," the poetic function is only secondary. Perhaps the transience, the short shelf life of such advertising ploys bespeaks the poverty in the intention to urge consumption rather than to satisfy it.
The question of "intention" has begun to emerge in these last paragraphs, and with that the question of what it means. Take, for an example, an anagram formed by the initial letters of the third stanza of Blake's "London," lines bracketed by the poem's two direct declarations "I hear":
The mind-forg'd manacles I hearThough unrecorded for almost two centuries, this seems an effect intended by the author, given the occasional occurrence of such anagrams in earlier poetry, the statistical improbability of the word's random formation, the priming context, the evidence of revision, and the apt interpretation it supports (in a poem about the necessity of altering perceptions--language first of all--the anagram offers an object lesson, a literal parable for the revelation possible in a revision of normal perceptual paradigms: who has eyes to see, let them [see] "hear" here).How the Chimney-sweepers cry
Every blackning Church appalls,
And the hapless Soldiers sigh
Runs in blood down Palace wallsBut most thro' midnight streets I hear
(italics added)A more problematic example comes from Ferdinand de Saussure's Cours de Linguistique Géne‚rale and its celebrated discussion of the arbitrary nature of the sign, "l'arbitraire de signe." By this Saussure means that the signifier, or sound-image, "is unmotivated, i.e. arbitrary in that it actually has no natural connection with the signified [i.e. `concept']" (69). Curiously enough for someone obsessed with identifying anagrams in Latin poetry (see Starobinski), the signified Saussure chooses to illustrate l'arbitraire is the sign l'arbre ("tree"). This seems unintended, in comparison to Blake's anagram, but not arbitrary--motivated in other words, if only by the opportunity to conserve a quantum of mental energy through hewing to pre-existing arboreous associations for language (cf. Saussure's later comparison, accompanied by an illustration, of linguistics to a plant stem cut transversely and perpendicularly; and also the standard branching "tree" of languages). Jacques Lacan, one might note, seizes on the "anagram of `arbre' and `barre'" to show how "our word `tree'" crosses "the bar [barre] of the Saussurian algorithm" of signifier/[bar]signified, having attached to it "a whole articulation of relevant contexts" (Ecrits 154).
"Intention," and its etymological doublet, "intension," derive from the notion of "stretching" or "straining" (Lt. intendere): the stretched or strained or forced point is, by this light, the one most intended. "Intension" has been applied to the tightening of instrument strings, to the augmentation of force (tension) generally and, specifically, to contrast intensification-as- extension, and to the "comprehension" or connotation of a term (again, in contrast with its "extension"). "Intention" similarly has been applied to instrument strings and to the idea of intensification--even as the "eagerness of desire" and "vehemence or ardour of mind" which head Samuel Johnson's 1755 definition of the word--but it now traffics more in the mental realm of purpose, goal, meaning, end: the "aboutness" or "directedness" of tendency. It bears remark, though, that the colloquialism denoting purpose-to-marry recognizes the complexities of that single act by privileging the plural form, "intentions." The strong association of "intention" with consciousness derives from philosophical concepts relating principally to the use of the term in phenomenology "to denote, roughly, the relation between an act of perception and the real object perceived" (Patterson 137).
But perception, it appears, is a multistage process operating to a great extent unconsciously, one in which, for instance, an "enormous amount of visual processing is necessarily carried out automatically and without awareness" (Marcel 199)--as in the dynamics, measured in milliseconds, of the eye's saccade (leap forward), fixation, and regular regression in its sweep over a line of print, eight or so characters at a time (your eye here and right now, for instance). Cognitive psychology demonstrates in many ways the surprisingly limited channel capacity of conscious experience (cf. Dixon 3-4, 261) and the existence of a hierarchy of processing stages which serve to limit the representation of input. The utility of such limiting is all the more evident as we realize that much perceptual processing occurs in parallel rather than seriatim (see Gazzaniga). For our "linear intelligence," as Robert de Beaugrande terms it, "overloading is never very far away" (31), hence all of us, most of the time, rely on already existing mental representations. One might be reminded here of Freud's comment in Beyond the Pleasure Principle that "[p]rotection against stimuli is an almost more important function for the living organism than reception of stimuli" (21), and his haunting suggestion that consciousness itself serves as a kind of "protective shield" (hence "blindness and insight"--the more one focusses on "z", the more one forgets "a-y"). In any event, with such complexities attending the notion of perception, one can hardly be surprised to find Stanley Cavell take up the idea that intentions must be conscious only to conclude, "[i]t is not clear what that means, nor that it means anything at all, apart from a contrast with unconscious intentions; and it is not clear what that means" (233). Richard L. Gregory writes, still more directly, "just what an intention is, in terms of brain processes or anything else is exceedingly hard to say" (383).
Questions of "linguistic intentionality" and authorial "intention" do, however, loom large in The Structure of Complex Words, William Empson's impressive study of complex lexes published in 1951. Empson's project might be seen as one working out of complications in Wittgenstein's sense that "intention is embedded in its situation, in human customs and institutions" (108)--taking those customs and institutions as language. Committed to "linguistics not psychology" (31), Empson is interested in "the covert assertions in a single word" (47) of the cultural lexicon as used by an individual, and in how there might be "an inner grammar of complex words like the overt grammar of sentences" (253). The "complex words" seem at first rather ordinary ones, such as "fool," "dog," "honest," "sense," but Empson employs them to study the way in which the contemporary bearing of these words, "referring their users to a background of shared understanding, comes to suggest an implicit ideology" (Norris 26). An Empsonian instance apropos of our critical and theoretical concern would be "intention" itself as the once hotly-contested word embodying a desire to establish some control on response, some gauge that would permit "validity in interpretation," or, finally, Truth. But, in attempting to decide what might constitute an "intention" one discovers the complicity of the concept with the idea of subjectivity, usually of the conscious, present-to-itself, sound-mind-and-body variety. A knowledge of "intention," for instance, might serve the desire for the self-validation of being the recipient of a message or communication from an authoritative figure, with whatever empowerment such validation might bestow (the idea, as Northrop Frye puts it, of the literary work's being the author's pie stuffed with "a specific number of beauties or effects" that the critic, like Little Jack Horner, has only to pull out with the self-congratulation "O what a good boy am I" [17-18]). To receive a message one has already assumed a very great deal about the nature of messages (and texts, and teaching) and the intentions behind them, particularly that the intentions of the other reciprocate with one's own. The simplest assumption is that the text embodies some sort of direct communication or representation--Wordsworth's "man speaking to men," for example--and that the reading relation mimes a version of Saussure's speaking relation, with its single direct line going from speaker's mouth to receiver's ear. More experienced entendeurs will at least sympathize with the contention of surrealist Michel Leiris that such a utilitarian notion of language as "born to facilitate men's mutual contacts" appears a "monstrous aberration" (in Ahl 18).
With regard to the "complex words" he brings forward, Empson feels that the term "head sense" ought to sum up and recall "a real field of activity for the critic" as one who "needs to know the general flavour and proportions of any crucial word in the minds of the audience primarily intended, and he needs to know whether other uses of the word by the author in hand show that he does something special with it" (75). "Head sense" makes the argument in a pun, combining "leading dictionary definition" with individual "mental ability"; but the conception of "the audience primarily intended" raises the question of history and psycho-cultural change. Empson finds "an historical locus for Complex Words in the Restoration and Augustan periods," that is, with authors writing in an age when "conventions were deep enough to achieve conviction without private backing" (Cavell 226), and for whom "complexity is a matter of social nuance, of tactful understatement and ironic self-regard" (Norris 101). The writers I will discuss in terms of some of their "lexis complexes" (a few from a wide range of possibilities) come from a later era, when the continuing evaporation of Christianity has weakened conventional reliance on words and the Word. The poet's "intention," for Empson, "is located precisely in the knowing play of attitude, ironic and self- critical, which keeps both poet and readers from an unreflecting state of immersion in the poem's metaphysical conceits" (Norris 134); later writers (and readers) have less faith in "knowing play" and may seem more preoccupied with constructing projections and displacements adequate to contain (temporarily) their needs and conflicts.
In his appreciative critique of Empson, Christopher Norris identifies "two basic dimensions in the understanding of a Complex Word: the informing background of historical context and the implications of and for the semantic grammar of its usage" (107). The consideration of "lexis complexes," on the other hand, finds its stamping ground in biography--especially as concerns early object relations, inaccessible and textualized though they must be- -and in the inflections and associations to be found in the individual's semantics. "Nature" and "reason" are complex words in Samuel Johnson's discourse, "restless" one example of its "complexemes". Empson takes "sense" as a complex word in The Prelude, where a sense of lexis complexes would include "since" and "presence/absence," even "incense" (cf. "smoke / Sent up, in silence"--"Tintern Abbey") and "in[-]no[-]cence". Rather than gauging a complex word's intentions and "covert assertions" (Empson 47, 255), the study of lexis complexes pursues covert associations the word holds in tension.(3) With its rationalist, phenomenological orienta- tion, Empson's Complex Words has little place for the unconscious, whereas the psychoanalytical bias in the imagining of lexis complexes takes the unknown as given.
The bottom line for the usual question regarding intention appears in Norris's remark that, "[a] line must of course be drawn between the critic's own virtuosity-- meanings patently `read into' the text--and the content he can claim to have uncovered" (33). Similarly Umberto Eco, having specified an intention of the author, of the work, and of the reader, distinguishes between "interpretation" as research into the first two, and "use" as the "imposition" of the latter (62, 50). We move here toward the rhetorical world made familiar by reader-response criticism, where reality is a matter of what positions achieve communal recognition; in that bizarre marketplace of ideas or ever- evolving textual ecosystem, the stretching or far-fetching of some points to make space for others seems a necessary part of critical response-ability. In the ensuing conflict or dialectic of readings one discovers, as Norris quickly acknowledges, that "[t]here is no absolute distinction, no possible demarcation between what is `in' the text and what is produced by the critic's active involvement" (34).(4)
A "pragmatic" way of formulating the question, then, recognizes the reader's necessary cooperation in producing the text, and finds intention in the implication of its words. In this view, initiated by H. P. Grice in over thirty years of occasional lectures and articles collected as Studies in the Way of Words in 1989, conversation--including the relation of writer and reader-- proceeds and depends upon certain shared assumptions. These Grice organizes according to four general maxims regarding Quantity (i.e., "give the right amount of information"), Quality (i.e., "try to make your contribution one that is true"), Relation (i.e., "be relevant"), and Manner (i.e., "be perspicuous") (26-27)--maxims which even in being "flouted" are confirmed. Modified by a generation of scholars (including Geoffrey Leech, John Searle, and Dan Sperber), such principles are still taken to govern the complex inferencing strategies by which we understand invisible or "implied" meaning. For Grice, recognizing a speaker or author's intention equals identifying the act he or she performs in all its implications, but as pragmatic critics who actually confront poetic effects have come to see, there are in such cases a vast continuum of implicatures ranging from fully determinate to very indeterminate, and poetic metaphors in particular access a wide range of weak implicatures (see Pilkington 53-56). Here once again we confront the practical need of limiting input, and since the inferencing of implicatures offers endless possibilities, considerations of relevance operate to constrain inferencing. Relevance in turn depends on context, the scenario one builds around the text, and criticism, including the chapters which follow, inevitably emphasizes or "privileges" a more or less limited context. The creation of a plausible context returns us to the familiar rhetorical considerations of any attempt to persuade--ethos, pathos, and logos.
We might consider, for an example, a literary text which Grice uses to illustrate the flouting of the maxim of manner, "Be perspicuous" (with its subordinate maxims: "Avoid obscurity of expression," "Avoid ambiguity," "Be brief," "Be orderly"). For an instance in which "the speaker intends or expects [ambiguity] to be recognized" and "the problem the hearer has to solve" is why this should be so, he offers "Blake's lines: `Never seek to tell thy love, love that never told can be'"--though "to avoid complications introduced by the presence of the imperative mood" Grice casts the sentence in first-person declarative, past-tense ("I sought ...") (35). He notes the double reference of "my love" to a state or an object of emotion, and how the second line means either that the love cannot be told, or if told, cannot continue to exist, and concludes "that the ambiguities are deliberate and that the poet is conveying both ... though no doubt the poet is not explicitly saying any one of these things but only conveying or suggesting them" (35-36). Further work with this example requires greater context, beginning with the literal text of the poem as it was available in the standard edition when Grice wrote:
[Never (seek del.) pain to tell thy loveThe revision of "seek" can indeed give readers "pain," since the rare intransitive usage with its obsolescent reflexive sense ("to take pains," the latest OED example is 1529) greatly complicates the imperative mood, but unless we are proposing an example without much relevance to an actual text, the particulars and context must matter. Generalizing the largest implications ("Never," "never") from the seemingly slender basis of one experience (an act which carries implications of its own), the speaker presents a complex picture of message and audience. The awkward sequence of the tenses--especially the present indicative "doth depart" (which parallels "does move")--the ambiguity of "love," and the vague reference of "she" ("my heart," the already ambiguous "love"), all work to take us into an unstable ego we might most naturally overhear as directing imperatives to itself. At this point our interpretation could take a psychoanalytical turn into the world of object- relations and find the manifestation of an unconscious depressive ambivalence highly relevant to the expression of ambiguity centering on a female-gendered love. But it should already be imaginable that "pain" in part implicates the speaker's subjective state, and its inner tensions are what the text--if not the hypothesized speaker--intends. Regarding the text as the representation of an illocutionary act rather than some direct communication in itself does not resolve the question of its motivation, though the additional displacement may suggest that such texts, like the productions for the dream-work for Freud, "are not made with the intention of being understood" (Interpretation 377).
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly. del.]I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart,
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears--
Ah, she doth depart.Soon as she was gone from me
A traveller came by
Silently, invisibly--
[He took her with a sigh del.]
O, was no deny.
(Keynes 161)Words present particularly complex objects for individual and cultural processing in view of the contention, stated by R. Hudson, that "[t]here is no known limit to the amount of detailed information ... which may be associated with a lexical item" (in Aitchison 12). To "know" a word fully would entail the impossibility of complete knowledge of the various systems in which it was implicated, including idiosyncratic personal references and the ongoing operant processing system. Of more immediate concern for lexical processing is polysemy, the condition of a word's having several or more meanings. Experimental research suggests that all the available known meanings of a polysemous word, and even homonyms, may be activated pre- consciously, although only one meaning will be selected (see Dixon 256, Aitchison 182-83). As with spontaneously reversing figure-ground designs where one cannot see simultaneously the profiles and the goblet, or the duck and the rabbit, there is for the polysemous word a fixed con- scious capacity limitation (Dixon 233). The linear intelligence guiding the organism does not long or well tolerate dissonance, poets' pleas for "negative capability" or a "willing suspension of disbelief" notwithstanding. Like humans in other aspects of life (cf. Gazzaniga 175), readers seek parsimonious and unified explanations for the logic governing texts, and hence, as Stephen Booth observes, "[m]ost people who talk about poetry will not admit secondary senses or overtones or invasions of logically impertinent contexts unless the presence of such ideational static is capable of promotion to the distinction of full- fledged, syntactically admissible ambiguity and therefore capable of interpretation" (370).
Recognizable ambiguity has long offered a kind of special-case logical category for literary criticism. According to the influential argument of Cleanth Brooks' The Well Wrought Urn (1947), a poet may "choose ambiguity and paradox" because the task "is finally to unify experience" (212). As the poet "perforce" dramatizes "the oneness of experience, even though paying tribute to its diversity," his or her "use of paradox and ambiguity is seen as necessary" in giving us "an insight which perceives the unity of experience and which, at its higher and more serious levels, triumphs over the apparently contradictory and conflicting elements of experience by unifying them into a new pattern" (213, 214). But to see paradox plainly, Brooks contended, "will require a closer reading than most of us give to poetry" (11), in fact, "the closest possible examination" (xi). The library's groaning shelves testify that we have risen to the occasion, and a half-century of ever closer reading finds us long past the parody of The Overwrought Urn (pub. 1969) and through the looking- glass of the text to face "the overdetermined yearn."(5) The deconstruction of the "unified," "total" structure or "oneness of experience"; awareness of parallel- -plural--processing; new sensitivities to the discourse of language and ideology, and to the psycho-dynamics of language acquisition and use, can combine to make undecidable what was before merely ambiguous or paradoxical. As per Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, once we enter the detailed realm of "the closest possible examination" the force of our observing itself touches our sense of verse and universe. To recall overdetermination, one has only to consider a favorite text and its train of widely-varying critical commentary, more than one portion of which probably receives assent. All the determinations, like a sum of vectors, are at work (or play) in and on "the total experience" (Brooks 75) of the text's passage to materiality, the word's present instantiation: "[t]he word, directed toward its object, enters a dialogically agitated and tension-filled environment of alien words, value judgments and accents, weaves in and out of complex interrelationships, merges with some, recoils from others, intersects with yet a third group: and all this may crucially shape discourse, may leave a trace in all its semantic layers, may complicate its expression and influence its entire stylistic profile" (Bakhtin 276).
One set of determinations difficult to formulate involves the author's life, particularly with regard to that individual's accession to language in early childhood and the acquisition of characteristic "in-tensions." At least during the flowering of individual subjectivity which has produced so much literature, the artist's life constitutes an indispensable context for the work. If a primary function of literature is "to convert a sector of reality (whether psychic or external) into literary reality" (Green 342), then that extra-literary reality forms an important reference. And if "the artist cannot take us where he himself has never been" (Rickman 307-8), and if "home is where we start from" (D. W. Winnicott), then some sense of early emotional, psychic, and perceptual states traversed will be implicated in understanding her or his work. Charlotte Brontë‰'s Jane Eyre offers a memorable instance in the heroine's three major encounters with different families, each representing the author's sibling configuration of two sisters and a brother. But of all the states through which an author has passed, that of learning language with mama supplies the least data, and the little we have of that absent, silent, mum period are "always already" textualized. But like the cosmic event or big-bang only accessible theoretically, the birth into the symbolic order perhaps leaves some trace of its occurrence in a background noise we can attune ourselves to hear.
Freud's passionate interests in the "talking cure," verbal symbolism, and "the antithetical sense of primal words," make all the more remarkable the extent to which he overlooked what we call, owing to the fixation he institutionalized, the "pre-oedipal" stage of development. It is during this period, prompted by a genetically encoded timetable, that the baby (in- fans, "not speaking") passes from being to a being merged with the body of the mother/world to a child split off from that former being, gaining the problematic compensation of a body of, a being in words and accompanying prohibitions, injunctions, names. Speculations concerning this speechless period are rich and strange--from Wordsworth's image of his "intercourse of touch" and "mute dialogues with [his] mother's heart" (Prelude [1805] 2.282, 283) to Julia Kristeva's sense of a "psychosomatic modality" embracing "the connections between the (glottal and anal) sphincters in (rhythmic and intonational) vocal modulations, or between the sphincters and family protagonists" (Revolution 28-29). In this matrix of mutter-matter the earliest word symbols "are fused not only with the object that is the ostensible referent, but also with the mother herself who taught the word" (Rosen 163). Margaret Mahler and her associates characterize the pre-oedipal stage in terms of separation-individuation and see language as "instrumental in creating a special pocket of maternal reserve" that can be called upon--even in the parent's absence--for the "emotional refueling" necessary to untroubled development (Shapiro 150). Already in 2«-year-old children one sees the internalization of language as they play on their own with words before going to sleep--language forms a kind of teddy bear or security blanket, a "transitional object" which opens the realm of illusion that can unfold in art (Shapiro 42). At least in some cases, perhaps, the writer's or critic's obsessive probing of language reflects or enacts or sometimes "works through" his or her insecure possession of such a "maternal reserve." So Jean-Jacques Lecercle, thinking of the insecurity that language engenders, suggests that "[o]ne writes about and against one's mother, one's mother tongue, in order to get rid of the anxiety of influence" (238)--the anxiety of lack, of loss, of having to use words.
But some do seem to work through to a re-membering and creating anew Mother tongue in poetic words. Tracking her own profoundly ambivalent maternal relationship, the American poet H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) undertook some analytical sessions with Freud in 1933; from these she became convinced that "mine is absolutely first layer. I got stuck at the earliest pre-OE stage, and `back to the womb' seems to be the only solution" (in Friedman 313). So in her account she writes of her mother, "one can never get near enough, or if one gets near, it is because one has measles or scarlet fever. If one could stay near her always, there would be no break in consciousness" (Tribute to Freud 33). Some ten years after that recognition, in her Tribute to the Angels ( -messenger), she offers this remarkable consideration of the most profound maternal complexis in the Western cultural archive:
Now polish the crucible
and in the bowl distilla word most bitter, marah,
a word bitterer still, mar,sea, brine, breaker, seducer,
giver of life, giver of tears;Now polish the crucible
and set the jet of flameunder, till marah-mar
are melted, fuse and joinand change and alter,
mer, mere, mèŠre, mater, Maia, Mary,Star of the Sea,
Mother.In acquiring language, writes Victor Rosen, "each individual goes through idiosyncratic processes of associating tactile, auditory, and other sensory stimuli (signals), childhood theories, fantasies, and experiences (signs) to the conventional word symbol" (187). This quotidian history of such intimate life is laid out for all to read in Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and its construction of Stephen Dedalus. The fiction builds up models of overdetermination as it commodiously recirculates through various nodal words such as "nice," "murmur," "order," "sin," and "Simon" (the name of Stephen's father). It shows how words whose meanings are unknown to Stephen guide him toward a cultural/symbolic order and reverberate "[t]he echoes of certain expressions ... in remote caves of [Stephen's] mind" (157) as his subjectivity gels. Joyce's novel offers a potted case for training a kind of (psycho-) "analytic attitude" in the way it demands and quickly begins to reward and reword the reader's evenly suspended, free-floating attention. So when, at the prospect of a religious retreat, "Stephen's heart ... withered up like a flower of the desert that feels the simoom coming from afar" (108), the momentary flicker over the book's singly-occurring "simoom" is soon reinforced by an invocation of "the name of the Father" to reverberate the reader into an oedipal Simon-complex reaching back to Stephen's "swoon of sin" (101--itself following his loss of self in the carved letters "Foetus" and the initials which fuse his name and his father's, "S.D."), and extending forward to one attraction for Stephen in joining the priesthood, the possibility of knowing (at last) "what was the sin of Simon Magus" (159). This example highlights the oedipal dynamic that engages Joyce before the "abnihilization of the etym" in Finnegans Wake, a dynamic so foregrounded, one might argue, because it distracted, even "soothed his eyes which still saw the image of his mother's face" and "soothed his ears in which his mother's sobs and reproaches murmured insistently" (Portrait 224; cf. "The mar of murmury mermers to the mind's ear" of the Wake [254]). With its deep cunning, Portrait gives the name of Stephen's mother only once (30), though as the Blessed Virgin it saturates the text; unlike the name given Stephen's father, "Mary" was in fact the name of Joyce's mother.
The complexly overdetermined lexis of the author is complicated still more in its reception by the reader's associations and intentions. At the same time that Cleanth Brooks was putting forward his examples of "closer reading," Leo Spitzer described how such readings came about for him. "The only way," he reports, describing one version of attention flottante, "is to read and reread, patiently and confidently, in an endeavor to become, as it were, soaked through and through with the atmosphere of the work." Then, "suddenly, one word, one line stands out," making "the characteristic `click' ... which is the indication that detail and whole have found a common denominator" (Linguistics 26-27).(6) Other readers can no doubt summon up analogous versions of this experience, certainly one of the most delicious that professional reading affords. Spitzer's "one word, one line," by virtue of its standing out, would be for the contemporary theorist Michael Riffaterre an example of the anomaly or "agrammaticality" that "marks a moment at which one shifts from a referential to a poetic code" and by which the analyst "can identify one of the transformational systems at work in the text" (de Man 34). For Riffaterre, Spitzer's "common denominator," at least in the case of a poem or poetic segment, will be in turn some pre-existent word or word group which he labels the "hypogram" or "matrix" and sees as generating the text and authorizing a definitive reading. The poem is a complex built around a word repressed by the text, and reading is completed by pulling out that verbal plum, with the concomitant perception of the text as "the ultimate word game, that is, as literary" (Riffaterre Semiotics 42). The "hidden hypogram," one commentator notes drily, can seem "very little compared to the intricacy of the work that was needed to disguise it" (de Man 38). According to this formalist endeavor, "the matrix is semantic, and not lexical or graphemic," and the resulting text "exteriorizes the inner semantic configuration of the nuclear word" (Riffaterre Text 77) with little place for whatever complex affect may have marked the configuring of the word's semantic content.
The Spitzerian "click" when one word suddenly stands out can be taken in other ways, of course. It suggests an experience like laughter at a joke, when, as Freud saw it, the seemingly irrational "primary processes" become conscious and energy thus liberated must be discharged (Interpretation 644), or like the frisson before the uncanny, or like the "flutter of jubilant activity" when the infant assumes an I in Lacan's "mirror stage" (Ecrits 2). It reflects feelings of mastery and power, pleasurable relief at the lowering of tension now that "a common denominator" opens the way to intervene, a door to further discussion. This reposes an ongoing question behind our consideration of complexes: does the affect accompanying the "click" stem from the sense of having in some degree demystified the text through identifying and denominating a possibly complex pattern? Or does it come from having found, at last, unawares, a way of "cathecting," investing, projecting a complex of one's own into the text and making it speak oneself?(7)
In his method of "psychocriticism" contemporary with Brooks and Spitzer, the French analyst Charles Mauron "superimposes" a writer's texts (ideally the entire oeuvre) to detect latent patterns. "[G]uided by the notion that the key to an expression or a work is to be found in other expressions or work," Mauron has "listened to resonances, followed associations, and sought out persistant groupings" in order to locate "underlying networks necessarily linked to the unconscious .... forming complexes and structuring the creative imagination" (52, 2). These networks correspond to affective themes which, expressed in recurring and evolving fantasies, embody the "personal myth" of the author. But given Mauron's repeated discovery of an obsession with the mother (e.g., in Racine, in Baudelaire, in Mallarm‚), Wendy Deutelbaum can point tellingly to the presence of Mauron's own "personal myth" and its profound implication in a psychoanalytic myth and cultural ideology. In a conclusion which bears pondering, perhaps particularly by men who would pursue complexes, Deutelbaum writes that her criticisms
do not discredit Mauron's readings. Mauron does find common patterns; and these reflect real places of "coincidence" between his own and other myths. His very partiality is a source of his work's strengths as of its limitations. By repressing a part of his own subjectivity, Mauron weaves a delusion of "objective explanations." His explanations repeat a monotonous albeit real patriarchal theme of ambivalent maternal fixation. (96)For the essays which follow, the Spitzerean "click" took, more often than not, the form of a homophonic "common denominator" linking aspects of the particular teaching text, corpus, and pertinent past and present corporeal realities. Arguing for an "applied grammatology," Gregory Ulmer imagines teaching a "new mimesis ... based on homophonic resemblance" (187) in which the "puncept" would figure with the "concept." Such a pedagogy, derived from "the fully developed homonymic program at work in Derrida's style" (168) and amply evident in present critical writing, would seize on the puns or homophones as precisely the device which, at the level of language, is "capable of relating elements with the least motivation, hence with the greatest economy of speed" and "generating the greatest `information' [i.e. negentropy]" (170, 172). Such synthetic terms may offer an instance of the "higher-order bootstraps" students will need to think a massive cultural inventory soon instantly accessible by the terabyte, in hypertext: as the neurologist Gerald Edelman observes, "[t]hinking occurs in terms of synthesized patterns, not logic, and for this reason, it may always exceed in its reach syntactical, or mechanical relationships" (152). The puncept may suggest such a synthesized pattern which works to tie together, or "suture," in highly economical fashion, a variety of "logical" considerations and procedures. Then there is the issue of a paradoxically revived "presence" of the author, or critic, if we agree with Lecercle that "[i]n paronomasia, it is I who speak. I make language do my bidding. I take an untrodden path, only faintly indicated by language--I force my way through words" (80). Such exhuberance may be intriguing and playful, or threatening and off-putting as a violation of the "cooperative principle"--the customary groan at a pun suggests the latter--but it will insure at least against "a delusion of `objective explanation.'" The "puncept" or complexis becomes at its best a word of art, a bit of critical poetry, that act defined by Wimsatt and Beardsley as "a feat of style by which a complex of meaning is handled all at once" (2).The pun or homophone thus offers a kind of Knotenpunkt linking various signifieds in its common denominator. At issue is whether--as it were--you travel outward from a word, letting the sounds generate conceptual material in "free" or even mechanical association, or whether, working from a mass of text, you try to home in on homophonic connections which might tie it together. The wager of Lexis Complexes is that these two movements constitute a double cone or vortex (each enmeshing with the other like those Yeats describes in A Vision), and that the second type of approach (by the reader) finally might suggest some sort of time-reversed and compressed experience of the first (by the writer). This doubled vvord-text might also image the originally interacting realms of lexis and individual childhood psychological environment which combine in the author's particular psycho-semantic inflections (including stylistic invariants as instances of repetition compulsion). So it is that many of the words soon to surface here are proper names and simple nouns, adjectives, and phrases typically encountered early in childhood (e.g. "Don't be restless"; "Don't be idle"; "moon"; "Aurelia"). Such "archeonymes," writes Derrida, describe "beneath the articulation of a sentence and a scene, a multiple economy of places, instances, and safes" (xlvii), and can be imagined, in part, to motivate our present penchant for puns and possibly lead us, like Thomas Pynchon's "dreamer whose puns probe ancient fetid shafts and tunnels of truth," to enact some "special relevance to the word, or whatever it is the word is there, buffering, to protect us from" (95).
Before we turn to some words, the following chapter tries first to suggest one aspect of "whatever it is" whose special relevance might work to overdetermine those words.
Notes to Chapter 11. The perennial fantasy of legislating language so to make perception a proprietary right achieved memorable expression in the (unsuccessful) suit brought by Mead Data Central, holder of the registered trademark LEXIS®, against Toyota Motor Corp. over the latter's use of the name "Lexus" for a new automobile (MEAD DATA CENT., INC., v. TOYOTA MOTOR SALES, 875 F.2d 1026 [2nd Cir. 1989]).
2. A possibility abetted, perhaps, by the familiar 7-Up advertising slogan, "You like it [Ike], it [Ike] likes you."
3. In Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein writes, "[s]uppose someone said: every familiar word, in a book for example, actually carries an atmosphere with it in our minds, a `corona' of lightly indicated uses. Just as if each figure in a painting were surrounded by delicate shadowy drawings of scenes, as it were in another dimension, and in them we saw the figures in different contexts.--Only let us take this assumption seriously!--Then we see that it is not adequate to explain intention" (181e). And he adds later, "Now, I say nothing about the causes of this phenomenon. They might be associations from my childhood" (216e).
4. Discussing psychoanalytic interventions, Roy Schafer writes: "... one cannot distinguish sharply what the analyst finds and what the analyst introduces as a narrative organization; no absolute distinction between analytic subject and object is tenable; all perception is interpretation in context" (184). And Wordsworth, in the memorable formulation of "Tintern Abbey," describes "all the mighty world / Of eye and ear, both what they half-create, / And what perceive".
5. Cf. OED, s.v., which cites Charles Kingsley, 1853, on Keats's "mighty yearn after ... beauty".
6. Compare the (self-)recognition scene of Browning's quester:
... When, in the very nick
Of giving up, one time more, came a click
As when a trap shuts--you're inside the den!Burningly it came on me all at once,
This was the place! ...
("Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," 172-76)7. Cf. Stanley Fish's disarming admission that "in the analysis of [the] lines from Lycidas I did what critics always do. I `saw' what my interpretive principles permitted or directed me to see, and then I turned around and attributed what I had `seen' to a text and an intention" (in Ray 162).