World Within The Word

by William H. Gass

  How do I know, for example, that the two expressions, “knowledge of French” and “knowledge of the French” are so very different? Because I know that my knowledge of the French language, and my knowledge of the French people are of distinctly different things. The presence of the ‘the’ will indicate a change, but it will not tell me what the change is or its degree. The phrase I just used (which was “the presence of the ‘the’ ”) is not much altered if I omit the article and say “the presence of ‘the’ ” instead.

  It may be true that the form of the sentence and the form of some thought which we might metaphorically say was contained in the sentence are distinct, but they are distinct notationally, not notionally. My knowledge of kitchens, fires and feet, bums and shoes, pants, pains, panties, enables me immediately and effortlessly to interpret the preposition correctly. One may now strike a light to the suspicion that a form without meaning is formless, and that there can be no ontology to structures without interpretation. Although some forms inhibit or deny others (it isn’t easy to see the circle as a square), nevertheless I can picture my cone in a lot of different ways—as a turning triangle, a stack of diminishing doughnuts, and so on. We must construe before we can construct, and so we might say, watching the fuse burn, that it may be semantics which makes syntax possible.

  Our word ‘of,’ for instance, which I have accused of being so blatantly ambiguous, may be defended from the charge by adopting a Platonic view of predicates and prepositions. The difference between the beauty of boys and girls, women and men, of practices and actions, laws and regulations, sciences generally, and Beauty Absolute, lies not in Beauty itself, which is the same in every case and occurrence, but in the subject where it shyly shows its nature; for the harmony of laws and bodies discloses itself differently in different media, just as music does when it tracks the page or flattens itself in a disc of chilly plastic or delights the air with dancing.

  ‘Of,’ we could insist, stands for one and only one relation, but a relation which is compelled to refeature its features when forced to appear between a finger and its hand rather than between wife and house or between tunics and their band.

  If Quine wants to talk this way, will syntax stop him? Is he encouraged by the common occurrence of the word to a belief in a common property?

  Why not say that chairs and questions, however unlike, are hard in a single inclusive sense of the word? There is an air of zeugma about ‘The chair and question were hard’ but is it not due merely to the dissimilarity of chairs and questions? Are we not in effect calling ‘hard’ ambiguous if at all, just because it is true of some very unlike things?

  (Word and Object, p. 130)

  Chairs are hard because they are made of stiff compacted material, though some chairs are hard to sit in because they are low slung and made of canvas or are really heaps of beans. If the chair is firm, it may be uncomfortable to sit on, and if it is uncomfortable to sit on, it may be difficult to continue sitting in it … which is what we say if it has arms. A side chair one sits on, an armchair one sits in. Difficulty is the common denominator here. A question is hard because it is impenetrable, like the wood of the chair, or embarrassing, and therefore psychologically uncomfortable and bruising to the ego as the chair may be bruising to the bottom, or simply difficult to answer in a number of obvious ways. Quine is right about the presence of a common property, but ‘difficulty’ is itself a word hugely ambiguous. There are all kinds of difficulties, and Ryle is right in claiming that such expressions as “tides, hopes, and the average age of death, are rising,” like many of the outrages I made up earlier, involve equivocation. In our example, there are four senses to the word ‘hard’ on the chair side alone. Children love both hot dogs and cats, but since you eat one and pet the other, children must love them differently. I love to murder and create. My two loves are only metaphorically the same. Most of our difficulties regarding chairs and questions are brought beneath the general term ‘hard’ metaphorically too. To say that a question is difficult is straightforward enough, but to say that it is difficult because it is hard to penetrate is not. To use the word ‘exists’ for both minds and bodies, numbers and bombast and building sites, is not the kind of automatic error Ryle so smoothly suggests it is, nor will Quine’s sturdy Platonism do. Cases must be taken one by one, and the form of the expression will solve nothing for us.

  Meanwhile that hand, which was to reach out and bring a world to life the way it’s done in Michelangelo’s fresco, has neither palms, nor, so far, any fingers of.

  3

  The sentences which we are about to consider constitute their world. They are everything that is. Each sound they make is a sound in this world; their lengths are its lengths, their places its places; their intonations are like weather, their stresses like storms, their rhythms are time dancing its grave way toward our demise. We must remember how wide the word ‘Iowa’ is. We must bear in mind how some words are closed at both ends like ‘top’ or are as open as ‘easy’ or as huffed as ‘hush.’ Some words click and others moan. Some grumble. Listen to the way the word ‘sister’ is put together. Can you feel the blow which chops off the end of ‘clock’? Nothing can be forgiven or forgot, certainly not the weighing of clauses against phrases, or the long departure of qualifiers from the wheel they were supposed to turn, or rim they were to rubber.

  Our number-one sentence is dominated by its verb: ‘thrust.’ In a context as tame as our specimen creates, a word like ‘thrust’ is like a drunk in a church. “The figure in greeting held out a hand.” Nothing there. Flab from one end to the other. Yet you see how readily strangeness is lost. Normally we hold out pencils, beer mugs, hope, help, but to hold out a hand is surreal. We have forgotten. We forget. The phrase, ‘in greeting,’ serves as a pivot on which the sentence is nicely balanced, but ‘thrust’ disturbs the equilibrium, as does the double stress, ‘thrust forth,’ with its two ths like rind around it.

  The sentence does not tell us that a gentleman, in greeting, thrust forth a hand. It speaks only of a figure. So there is fog, or muffle, or swaddle, or darkness. Whatever the reason, the initial word raises questions of knowledge and point of view, the way the word ‘gentleman’ brings up questions of class and value. The thrusting forth is all the more appropriate for a shadowy figure. Consider 1.1:

  A hand emerged from his sleeve like a mouse from its hole.

  You think you know how that is? You have observed many a mouse, and they always bolt out as if several small cats were after them? or do they creep out cautiously, look round and around, or saunter, whistling through their tiny teeth? The point is that the sentence suggests that the hand came out timidly, warily; that it was far from thrust. The mouse we are referring to here is a cartoon mouse, a literary mouse, not a real mouse. Neither author nor reader has watched mice—that’s a good bet—but they have read about them. Even if you were an accomplished mouse-watcher and knew that mice first warily peeked about before bolting, you would have to forget what you’d seen and remember what you’d read: that mice creep until they’re scared and then they scurry. So a literary convention appears here in the guise of an observation. Just as we recognized that our model sentence was a written not a spoken one, we must now acknowledge the wind-up nature of this particular mouse. We have had to invoke what is commonly called the pragmatic dimension. A mouse that bolted like lettuce from its hole would be, of course, another matter and another mouse.

  Could we have sentence 1.2, now, please?

  A gentleman, in the livery of a butler in a play or a count in a comedy, thrust toward me what appeared to be a plate of pickled worms, yet he did so with a smile so appropriate to the serving of drinks or the offering of hors d’oeuvres that I was quite at a loss as to how to receive them.

  We are plainly in the mind of some mordant wit now, and not in the physical world at all. Our initial sentence was ambiguous about that. It contained an interpretation (that the hand was thrust forth in greeting, not in anger or pleading), and if
we were making a world without a mind, we couldn’t include it. Similarly, if we were imagining an unseen scene, or one observed only by a telescope, Robbe-Grillet, or a tree, then we couldn’t make any kind of comparison, because nature doesn’t make metaphors, metaphors must be made by a figure in the fiction or by the author from without. If by an author from without, the sentence is still compatible with a world of dumb matter, though there will be above it, as in a satellite, a godlike eye, or some of our astronauts crying wow! and golly! at the moon.

  Yet suppose we wish to be in the sort of world which Borges might imagine, the figment of some falsified encyclopedia, not just a world where there were no qualities and nouns, so that our expression, “The moon rose above the river,” would have to be rendered, as he suggests, “Upward behind the onstreaming it mooned”; but a world which made metaphors the way we make babies or mistakes, a world filled with smoke from flaming cheeks and bedrooms frosted with icy looks, where the ground was littered with the rubbery remains of punctured hopes, and the milk of human kindness was spooned on wounds like sour cream on baked potato … well, it could be done, but only by altering the conventions concerning the literal, so that “she fairly flew into his arms” would be literal, while “she ran to meet him” would be an amusing metaphor involving the refusal of metamorphosis, as though a butterfly might refuse to relinquish its cocoon. Whether we’re in Tlön or Toledo, the principle remains unchanged: the text must give us the clues for its own interpretation, and it is by means of that interpretation that the fictional world arises above its page, or “Inwardly over and through its typening it fairytaled.”

  If our funny gentleman is in the livery of a butler, and the butler is in a play, is the gentleman in a play? And if we shake his wormy hand, will we then be in a play as well? We must be brave, but careful too. This sentence undermines itself. It can’t decide whether to advance a butler or a count, and the comparison of the hand to a plate of worms is so weird, we have to wonder about its description of the costume. It is, moreover, a sentence which calls attention to itself, reminding us that if we are in some man’s mind, we are very definitely in the verbal part. In the rococo consciousness of our observer, the actual extension of a hand has been nearly lost. Let us try to recover it with sentence-set 2.

  2. He held out his hand. It was plump, pale, stubby, damp.

  2.1 It was a seamed and broken, dirty hand. He held it out.

  2.2 He thrust out a threatening, greedy, malicious hand. I backed away.

  2.3 Nails? bitten. Palm? small. Lifeline? early broken. Skin? dry and freckled. Cuticles? unkept. Condition? loose or limp. Condition? soft. Color? pale. Conditon: calm.

  Our model sentence merely noticed its hand, nothing more, while 1.1 paid more attention to a mouse. A hand was noticed, but what was noticed was displaced. All of the sentences of set 2 observe the hand, they do not merely notice it. The lackey of 1.2 extended toward us an imagined hand, and then that gesture was compared to the offering of hors d’oeuvres. Since the number of things which might be observed is indefinitely large, each observation must select, but we can nevertheless classify some selections as compatible, others as incompatible. The plump, pale, stubby, damp hand of 2 might be the seamed and broken, dirty hand of 2.1, yet the qualities do not reinforce one another; they do not call to one another for confirmation. As a color, white is equally appropriate to snow, lard, or sugar, and the color is therefore equally compatible with sweet, cold, or greasy. Except to the careful reader (bless his moving lips), this would hardly matter, but a world made of merely compatible qualities is one which we experience quite differently from a world of constant reinforcement where, despite the danger of catching cliché, ‘damp’ and ‘nervous’ are inevitably found locked in an adjectival embrace, let alone a world in pieces like a torn-up letter, aflutter with clear calm muddy colors and quiet untroubled screams.

  The first sentence of this series proceeds properly. A hand is held out, I notice it, then I commence my collection. Since I have not grasped the hand (that gnarled, almost fingerless, tree knob? not on your life), its dampness must be copious, and the light right. If the sentence said that the hand was plump, pale, damp, and scented, we might become suspicious. Thus my observations place me at a certain distance. The lifeline which was noted as broken in 2.3 suggests a closer approach than either 2 or 2.1. There is another sort of distance, and this one will add to our collection of hands (so far, noticed, imagined, and observed), because 2.4 (“He held out a hand so like the one which had struck me as a child I flinched without knowing why”) contains a hand which, clearly, is being recalled.

  The fictional quality of our sentences has little relation to their logical form. As we unfold our initial set-2 sentence so as to articulate fully the nature of its structure, the character of the original simply disappears, meaning changes, and what is more important, the actual manufacture of the hand exhibits different principles. We are in another world. Listen as we become more logically explicit:

  2. He held out his hand. It was plump, pale, stubby, damp.

  2a. He held out his hand. It was plump, and pale, and stubby, and damp.

  2b. He held out his hand. It was plump, and it was pale, and it was stubby, and it was damp.

  Our original was not a hand made up of four equal and merely conjoined facts, because, if it were, any order of properties would, like numbers, reach the same sum.

  2c. He held out his hand. It was damp, stubby, pale, plump.

  Anyone for whom that is the same sentence has a thumb in their ear. The more logically naked version is also the more breathlessly adolescent. It is no longer a hand observed, but one noticed so emotionally that it appears cut apart like a chicken: to be just one thing—wing, thigh, neck, breast, pope’s nose, beak, feet—on seven different occasions. I saw a dragon, and it was breathing fire, and it was all covered with green scales, and it had a tail which reached a thousand miles, and breath bad enough to poison Poland. Nor can we hope to insert a few ifs, ors, and ands, like UN Observers along a disputed strip, and expect them to remain semantically neutral. Every and, every it, every was, will wear a number: the third it, the second was, the first and. Fiction is like garbage washed to sea on Heraclitus’ river. As the famous chef said: you can’t take the same bite twice, especially if you swallow.

  It is the multiplied p and b sounds; it is the dum dum dum de dump; it is ump and ubb and amp, which makes this hand. A hand that’s damp, stubby, pale, plump, is a hand which doesn’t hang together. The sounds of any sentence are its bones. This is all skin like an empty glove. The rhythm is dependent on that sound, the sound on the order of ideas, the ideas on the Early English bluntness of the words, that bluntness then on the notions it hardens and rounds, those notions in turn on the order and nature of their noises, and these noises again on good old dum dum dum de dump. Fictional form is wholly up front like the body of a woman. It is surface, like sculpture. It fills the ear with the moist eager mouth of the speaker—worse luck.

  In contrast, consider the hand that is threatening, greedy, and malicious. It is a completely subjective hand. It has neither palm nor fingers, it has only meaning. On the other hand, if I dare to say so, 2.3 has the ring of an autopsy report. Nails? it inquires. Bitten, is the answer. Or a pilot’s checklist. Palm? small. And it drops over its description a rhetorical form drawn from another realm. We have already had hands which were noticed, observed, remembered, and imagined. Now we see that we can have hands which are rhetorically observed, as this one is, or rhetorically remembered or imagined. However, in this particular example, even that form is askew, because no checklist, no interrogation, would repeat the same question and expect different answers: Condition? loose or limp. Condition? soft. Condition: calm.

  May not grammar dictate metaphysics here: one of substances and their qualities? All are adjectives, and doesn’t an adjective modify a noun? Yet is it the way we modify an engine in order to run it faster, or a request in order to con a boss? If I understand my
metaphysics, qualities don’t modify substances, whose entire business it is to remain as constant as concrete, but sprawl about on them like bathers on hot rocks. Besides, do we want to call plumpness and stubbiness qualities? Aristotle would surely classify them as states or conditions. No. Subjects are subjects, not substances, and there is no quality or relation I can’t turn into a noun if that’s what I want to talk about, and if I am a student of stubbiness in hands and pencils, torn tickets, checks, or pen ends, I shall have no great difficulty, like Quine, in thinking of the quality as swinging into its substance like a wrecker’s ball, for you may recall that it was his suggestion that subjects, in effect, modified their predicates, rather than the usual other way.

  3. I should say that the hand he held out to me was not above seven inches from wristwatch to tip of middle finger, and its breadth couldn’t have been more than four inches, even while receiving change.

  3.1 All his fingers were the same size.

  I described that greedy threatening hand as subjective because it recorded a reaction rather than an action, but the first hand here is even more withdrawn, and the description tells us far more about its anally compulsive composer than its alleged object, because held-out hands are normally never noted this way. Seven inches? Is that a large hand or a small one? We carry a file on penises but not on hands, and so we would most likely have to stop and think, if the sentence didn’t imply hand-size in other ways. “Not above seven,” it says. “With a breadth which couldn’t have been more than four,” it goes on, even when stretched to its greediest width. This is false precision, useless accuracy, and if it means to define a hand for us, it fails. Of course, it has no such intention. It aims at an epiphany of the observer’s character.