Finding a Form

by William H. Gass

  When cast in lead, carved in bark, billboarded by a highway, up in lights, words had a palpability they had never had before; nor did they need all the machinery of rhyme and rhythm and phrasing, of rhetoric’s schemes or poetry’s alliterations, since they could be consulted again and again; they could be pored over; they could be studied, annotated, lauded, denied. For Plato, though, the written word had lost its loyalty to the psyche, which had been its source, and Phaedrus could hold beneath his cloak a roll on which another’s words were written, words which Phaedrus thought he might soon pronounce, allowing them to seem his, performing passions and stating beliefs not necessarily held or felt by him, handing his conscience over to a ghost, practicing to be a president.

  Although the written word made possible compilations of data, subtleties of analysis, persistence of examination, and complexities of thought which had hitherto seemed impossible, it contributed to the atrophy of memory, and, eventually, by dispelling the aura of the oral around words, to the absence of weight, consequence, and conviction as well.

  Except that poets and prophets and canny politicians continued to write as if they spoke for the soul, and to this end their sentences sometimes still sang in a recognizable voice. However, the displayed word was almost immediately given fancier and fancier dress; calligraphic sopranos soon bewitched the eye; creatures, personalities, events, and other referents, were pictured alongside language to amplify it, dignify it, illuminate it, give it the precious position it deserved. In fact, so unchecked and exuberant was this development of the visual that writing was often reduced to making headlines or composing captions.

  Add radio to print and the word became ubiquitous. It overhung the head like smoke and had to be ignored as one ignores most noise. It was by loose use corrupted, by misuse debased, by overuse destroyed. It flew in any eye that opened, in any ear hands didn’t hide, and became, instead of the lord of truth, the servant of the lie.

  Readers were encouraged to race like a motorcar across the page, taking turns on two wheels, the head as silent as an empty house, eager for the general gist, anxious to get on. Rarely did a reader read in the old-fashioned, hesitant, lip-moving way—by listening rather than by looking, allowing the language fastened on the page its own performance; for then it would speak as though souled, and fly freely away into the space of the mind as it once had in the rarer atmospheres of the purely spoken world.

  New notations confound old orders and create essential changes. They are not simply, as Hobbes mistakenly thought, “poor unhandsome though necessary scaffolds of demonstration.” They become a part of the process they describe, the relations they denote. Zero came into being when we learned to circumnavigate its absence. Now we know Nothing is this convincing hole in “O.” Given a new and supple symbol system, mathematicians make astonishing strides. Descartes’s discovery of analytic geometry is based upon a new way of representing points, lines, and figures in a matrix of numbers. The alphabet helps make the mind, and language becomes not only the very vehicle of thought but much of its cargo. Music bursts forth into its modern form when signs that facilitate sight-reading emerge from neumes, and when the voice learns it must do more than merely rise and fall to please. As a consequence of the miracle of the modern scale, the composer could take down imagined music. Similarly, more than memory is served when objects are reduced to reproducible, transmissible, dots. The image is now as triumphant as money, as obnoxious as the politician’s spiel, as ignored as other people’s pain, as common as the cold.

  In sum: there is the observed word, watched as you might an ant or an interesting bird; and there is, of course, the spoken word as well, since we still make conversation, go to plays, and look on in a contrived night while movie stars enunciate clichés as if such commonplaces were the only language; but, in addition, there are the silent sounds we make within the hall of our head when we talk to ourselves, or take any prose or poetry seriously enough to perform it, to listen with our brains, whether to a writing written when singing it was standard, as here, in this wonderful bit of early Middle English, dealing with one of the seven sins:

  The greedy glutton is the fiend’s manciple. For he sticketh ever in the cellar or in the kitchen. His heart is in the dishes; his thought is all on the cloth; his life in the tun; his soul in the crock. Cometh forth before his Lord besmutted and besmeared, a dish in his one hand, a bowl in his other. Babbleth with words, and wiggleth as a drunken man that mindeth to fall, beholds his great belly; and the fiend laugheth that he bursteth.

  or in this delicious bit from Jeremy Taylor, one of English prose’s greatest masters, about the difficulty of dying:

  Take away but the pomps of death, the disguises and solemn bugbears, the tinsel, and the actings by candlelight, and proper and fantastic ceremonies, the minstrels and the noisemakers, the women and the weepers, the swoonings and the shriekings, the nurses and the physicians, the dark room and the ministers, the kindred and the watchers; and then to die is easy, ready, and quitted from its troublesome circumstances.

  These are lines composed for the pulpit and delivered to the ear as honesty ought. Nearer to our time, there is now and then prose whose performance is only hoped for, bidden but rarely achieved, like any of Proust or James or Joyce.

  I call her Sosy because she’s sosiety for me and she says sossy while I say sassy and she says will you have some more scorns while I say won’t you take a few more schools and she talks about ithel dear while I simply never talk about athel darling she’s but nice for enticing my friends and she loves your style considering she breaksin me shoes for me when I’ve arch trouble and she would kiss my white arms for me so gratefully but apart from that she’s terribly nice really, my sister …

  Beginning with the breath, first broken into audible elements, then made visual as a hawk is admirable, soaring on similar air, and concluding in the inhibited movements of the inner voice, each of our three languages is made of more or less extended strips of signs, ribbons of words like the spool which makes up Krapp’s last tape, and, geometrically speaking, is reducible to lines of variable lengths. It might be prudent simply to remind ourselves that the spaces which poetry requires to distance verses and lines from one another are operative elements in the verbal path, which, in that sense, remains equally unbroken whether prose or poetry is in question.

  It is natural to suppose that the splitting up of the printed line (composed of alphabet blocks and blocklike spaces), as well as the arrangement of these lengths in rows on the plane of the page and the subsequent piling of pages one upon another to form the material volume of the text, which the book’s case will then retain and protect, are all the most normal and modest of conventions, as, of course, the sounds and letters are (indeed, it constitutes a perfectly Euclidean lesson in spatial construction, beginning with points, assembling their numbers into lines, combining the lines to form planes, and, by stacking these, eventually achieving volume); and that there is nothing about the book as a material entity, neither in its pages, nor in its lines, nor in its principles of manufacture, that is essential to the meaning and nature of its text, no more than the shelf that holds the spices is a spice itself or adds to their piquancy or savor.

  Even if sounds once wonderfully mimicked the various kinds of things and creatures that populated nature, and even if ancient hieroglyphs depicted their referents as faithfully as the most vulgar bourgeois painter, by now these resemblances have been forgotten and are no longer relevant, because it is the sheerest accident, as far as sense goes, that “book” and “look,” “hook” and “crook,” “brook” and “spook,” “nook” and “cook,” share twin o’s, like Halloween eyes, and terminate in k as does “kook” and “rook.” Moreover, the relation between “hoot” and the owl’s, “toot” and the train’s, “soot” and smudge, “loot” and L.A., is perfectly arbitrary, could be anything at all, except that frequently used words tend to be short, and coarse words Anglo-Saxon.

  So one is inclined by common
sense and local practice to consider the book as a simple vehicle for the transportation of texts, and no more does the meaning of a text change when clapped between unaccustomed covers than milk curdles when carried by a strange maid.

  However, as Whitehead suggested, common sense should find a wall on which to hang itself. That the size of type, the quality of paper, the weight of what the hands hold, the presence and placement of illustration, the volume’s age, evidence of wear and tear, previous ownership and markings, sheer expense, have no effect upon the reader and do not alter the experience of the text is as absurd as supposing that Aïda sounds the same to box or gallery, or that ice cream licks identically from cone or spoon or dish or dirty finger.

  But, Mr. Obvious objects, the meaning of the text cannot change unless the text changes. Any reaction to that meaning is certainly dependent upon external factors, including one reader’s indigestion and another reader’s mood; however, the text remains the text, regardless of print, paper, and purse strings, unless you alter the words and their procession.

  Three basic errors must be made before Mr. Obvious’s view can begin to sustain itself. First, the nature of the word must be misunderstood; next, the concept of “text” will require an overly narrow definition; and third, the metaphysical problems even book embodies will have to be resolutely ignored. Only in this way, for Mr. Obvious, can a book remain … well … a book, what else? Furthermore, for Mr. Obvious again, the future of the book will have to seem doubtful, since new technologies have surpassed it in density of data, convenience of use, ease of reference, immediacy of communication, complexity of relation. Computers, with their keys, screens, codes, and disks, their facile methods of manipulation, their memories and hyperspaces, will do it in.

  Let us consider the word, first, in terms of the ontology of its composition. This will be the same, in a way, as considering any larger units, whether they be phrases, paragraphs, pages, volumes, or sets.

  The words that I am reading now, for instance, in order that I may speak them in your presence are not words in the full sense; they are, first of all, marks on an otherwise unmarked page, then sounds undulating in a relatively quiet space; however, these marks and these sounds are but emissaries and idols themselves, what logicians call tokens, of the real English words—namely “now,” namely “reading,” namely “am,” namely “I,” namely “that,” namely “words,” namely “the”—or what logicians refer to as the Language Type. If this were not so, then, if I were to erase the word “word” from this paragraph’s opening clause—“the words that I am reading now”—or if I were to fall firmly silent in front of the w and refuse to go on; then there’d be no more “word” for word, written or spoken, like that momentarily notorious expression “dibbit ulla rafiné snerx,” which was said once—just now—written hardly at all, given this temporary body only to disappear without ever gaining a soul, that is to say, a significance.

  To be precise, we do not write words or speak them either. We use their tokens, or stand-ins. Each hand, each voice, is unique; each stamp, each line of print, is somewhat less so, though they form the same message, ACCOUNT OVERDRAWN, on the checks of hundreds of congressmen, in the headlines of the papers, in the accusations of impropriety by their constituents. But the Language Type is the same whatever the ink, the cut of the stamp, the font, the accent, tone of voice. At this level a word is more than its meanings; it is also a group of rules for its spelling and pronunciation, as well as a set of specifications which state its grammatical class and determine its proper placement and use in the normal sentence. That is, if my recent paragraph’s opening had been: “I that am words reading the,” we should recognize the tokens—“the” is still “the” there, as far as its marks mean and its sounds sign, but we should have trouble assigning them their Language Types, for “the” is not where “the” belongs, articling up to something.

  Precisely the same distinction—that between type and token—can be made concerning sentential forms, since an assertion’s shape is only embodied by a proposition and is not so enamored of its momentary location and job description that it can’t serve somewhere else, even at the same time, or find that its fate is fastened to the tokens in whose sentence it is, for the nonce, displayed. Rhetorical schema are equally abstract and repeatable. The difference is that forms are displayed while meanings are signified.

  So let us journey into Plato’s country for a moment, and speak of the Pure Type, not merely a linguistic one, and of a Pure Rhetorical Schema, a Sentential Form. Although “mot” means “word” and “wort” means “word” and “parole” means “word” and “word,” to be fair, means “logos” means “verbo,” and so on, from tongue to tongue, the pure Word they each depend on, and which constitutes their common core, has no rules for its formation, since it escapes all specific materiality, has, in fact, never been written, never spoken, never thought, only dreamed during our extrapolations, envisioned solely by great Gee’d Geist, large R’d Reason, or the high-sided M of Mind.

  This progression—from verbal token to Language Type and from that Type to unspoken Idea—has always seemed to some philosophers to be eminently reasonable, while it appears to others as an example of Reason capitalized, another case of reification, and, like Common Sense before, leading us astray. But imagine for a moment that all the tokens of a particular Language Type have been removed from past or present use, as the Führer wished to do with Jewish names. Even so, we would be able to generate tokens once again, since we should still have a definition, know the word’s part of speech, and understand its spelling. Indeed, only intellectually is it possible to separate the spelling of a word from the word itself. To show how a word is spelled, one writes the word. However, if the Language Type were also removed, the word would at once disappear, and disappear for good, because the Pure Type has no material instantiation. It is a limit. Which means that words have a special kind of nonspecific or floating residence, because our belief even in a Pure Type depends on there being at least one material instance (or the rules for making such an instance) in existence. Which is as true of the book as of the word, for, in a way, the book itself isn’t “in” any one example of its edition, either, although at least one copy has to be about, or the printer’s plates, along with the outline for its manufacture.

  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: