Longer Views (69 page)

If we have a universe composed only of real, unique objects performing unique processes, how do we order them? (Are we stuck with G. Spencer-Brown's suggestion from
Laws of Form
that “equals” must be taken to mean “is confused with”?) Or, more germane: Since we
do
perceive the universe as ordered, can we work back to such a universe of unique objects-and-processes without contradiction?

Language is miraculous not in its power to differentiate. Differentiation, when all is said and done, is carried on nonverbally by the reasonable cross-checking of the information of the other senses. The wonder is that language can respond to any number of
different
things in the
same
way: it can call ashtrays, actors, and accidents “entities”; it can call poems, paintings, and nesselrode pies “art”; it can call what three different men at three different times of day do when going down the street “walking”; it can call three entities that walk down the street at the same time “women”; it can call sentences, ideas, and blue-prints “models”; it can call freedom, death, the color white, and the Second-World-War-and-all-its-causes “volumes in multidimensional meaning space”; it can call causing pain, inflicting suffering, and perpetrating injustice “evil.” In this way language guides the senses to concentrate on various areas
and aspects of the world for further examination and further differential cross-checking.

Things “obviously” similar are coherent areas of meaning-space only because of the shadow the senses throw over them. Those areas not so obviously coherent become so under the various shadows language can cast.

59. Science fiction is a way of casting a language-shadow over coherent areas of imaginative space that would otherwise be largely inaccessible.

60. Is it the tragedy of mind? Or is it what assures the mind's development: Today's seminal idea is tomorrow's critical cliché.

— London
1973–1974

 

*
John Oliver Simon, with whom I actually went to summer camp at Woodland.

*
Such translation into an artificial language may at first seem suspect. But is it really any more dubious than the translation Russell suggests in his theory of singular descriptions which so facilitates the untangling of
Plato's beard?

*
Metonymy
is, of course, the rhetorical figure by which one thing is called with the name of another thing associated with it. The historian who writes, “At last, the crown was safe at Hampton,” is not concerned with the metallic tiara but the monarch who, from time to time, wore it. The dispatcher who reports to the truckboss, “Thirty drivers rolled in this weekend,” is basically communicating about the arrival of trucks those drivers drove and cargoes those trucks hauled.
Metonymic
is a slightly strained, adjectival construction to label such associational processes.
Metonym
is a wholly-coined, nominative one, shored by a wholly spurious (etymologically speaking) resemblance to “synonymy/synonym” and “antinomy/antinym.” Still, it avoids confusion. In a text practically opaque with precision, it distinguishes “metonymy”-the-thing-associated (“crown,” “driver”) from “metonymy”-the-process-of-association (crown to monarch; driver to cargo). The orthodox way of referring to both is with the single term.

*
The épistçmé is the structure of knowledge read from the epistemological
textus
when it is sliced through (usually with the help of several texts) at a given cultural moment.

*
The important point here, of course, is that nonverbal material must already be considered
as
language, if not as part
of
language.

*
This is another invocation of the idea, out of favor for so long, of “morphophonemes.” The theoretical question of course is do they differ (or how do they differ) from “sememes.”

*
Welsh (and Homeric Greek) divide the spectrum (both as to colors and intensity) quite differently from English.

“
A
” (Zukofsky),
166
,
172

A la recherche du temps perdu
(Proust),
202

A-minor Symphony
(Mendelssohn),
50

ABC
(Silliman),
146
,
169
,
172

Adam, Helen Douglas,
209

Adam Bede
(Eliot),
260

Adamov, Arthur,
4

Addison, Joseph,
xiv

Adorno, Theodor,
68
,
70
,
78

In Search of Wagner
,
68

The Jargon of Authenticity
,
70

Adventures of Alyx, The
(Russ),
116

Agassiz, Louis,
110

“Age of Dream, An” (Johnson),
243
n

Agon: Towards a Theory of Revisionism
(Bloom),
196

Ailey, Alvin,
18

“Albany” (Silliman),
146
,
169
,
170
,
172

Aldington, Richard,
147

Portrait of a Genius, But
. . .,
174

Aldiss, Brian W.,
278

Report on Probability A
,
280

Alien Critic, The
,
257
,
298

Allen, Donald,
240

Allen, Robert,
261

Allgemeine Oesterreichische Zeitung
,
52

Alphabet, The
, series (Silliman),
146
,
157
,
163
,
169
,
171
,
172

Alvarez, A.,
185

American Shore, The
(Delany),
xvi

Amitie du Prince
(Perse),
209

“An einen Staatsanwalt” (Wagner),
52

Anabase
(Perse),
209

Anathēmata, The
(Jones),
166

“And I Am Telling You” (Bennett),
154

Anderson, Laurie,
xxx

Angel Fire
(Oates),
259

“Angouleme” (Disch),
xvii
,
xxiv

Anouilh, Jean,
14
,
80
,
315

Anthony and Cleopatra
(Barber),
18
–21

Antigone
(Cocteau),
14

antinomies,
265
–274

Grelling's paradox,
273

Apollo of Bellac, The
(Giraudoux),
317

“Apology for Raymond Sebond, An” (Montaigne),
xxxv

Appalachian Spring
(de Mille),
197
n

“Architecture of
The Bridge
” (Unterecker),
187

Ardrey, Robert,
157

Arendt, Hannah,
71
,
93

The Origins of Totalitarianism
,
71
,
93

Aristotle,
13
,
25
,
40
,
Poetics
,
13

Armantraut, Rae,
170

“Engines,”
170

Arnold, Matthew,
35
–37,
40
–42,
64
,
78
,
79

Culture and Anarchy
,
35

“Culture and Its Enemies,”
40
,
78

“Dover Beach,”
35

Arp, Hans,
4

Art and Death
(Artaud),
13

Art and Illusion
(Gombrich),
273

Art and Revolution
(Wagner),
3
,
16
,
48
,
63

Artaud, Antonin,
x
,
xxvii
–xxx
,
1
–17,
22
,
41
,
42
,
75
,
76
,
78
–84,
172

Art and Death
,
13

Backgammon in the Sky [Tric Trac du ciel]
,
13
,
25

The Cenci
,
4
,
11
,
14
,
15

“Centre-Mére et Patron-Minet,”
5

Correspondence with Jacques Rivière
,
14
,
23
,
172

“Cri,”
26
,
30
,
172

“La Culture Indiene,”
6

Douze Chansons
,
25

Heliogabalus, or The Anarchist Crowned
,
13

Letters from
Rodez
,
3

“No More Masterpieces,”
15
,
30
,
76

“Le Pèse-Nerfs,”
15

“The Return of Artaud, le Mômo,”
4
,
5

The Return of Artaud, le Mômo
,
13

The Theater and Its Double
,
2
,
14
,
31
,
76

To Have Done with the Judgment of God
,
10
,
12
,
31

“Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society,”
7
–10

A Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara [The Peyote Dance]
,
3

Artwork of the Future, The
(Wagner),
3
,
16
,
48

Ashberry, John,
41
,
159

Athanasiou, Genica,
14

Athenaeum
,
3
,
230

“Atlantis” (Crane),
185
,
187
,
215
,
216
,
224
,
226
,
227
,
231
,
237
,
244
,
245

Atlantis: Model 1924
(Delany),
xvi
,
xxxv
,
244
,
245

Auden, W. H.,
33
,
79
,
80
,
83
,
159
,
278

“Caliban to the Audience,”
83

The Sea and the Mirror
,
83

W. H. Auden: Collected Poems
,
240

Auerbach, Berthold,
67

Auntie Mame
(Dennis),
317

Austen, Jane,
38
,
260

Authoress of the Odyssey, The
(Butler);
164

“Ave Maria” (Crane),
189
,
215
,
218
,
219
,
221
,
222
,
224

“Baby Is Three” (Sturgeon),
257

Bach, Johann Sebastian,
67

Backgammon in the Sky [Tric Trac du Ciel]
(Artaud),
13
,
25

Bacon, Francis,
xiii
,
xiv

Essays,
xiv

Baird, Peggy,
189
,
243

“The Last Days of Hart Crane,”
243

Bakhtin, M. M.,
82
,
84
,
107

Bakúnin, Mikhail,
37
,
46
,
47
,
49
,
52
–55,
57
,
60
–63,
65
,
84

Baldwin, James,
205

Giovanni's Room
,
205

Ballets Africains, Les
,
153

Balzac, Honoré de,
13
,
37
,
74

Banquet Years, The
(Shattuck),
37

Barbarossa, Frederick,
54

Barber, Samuel,
18

Anthony and Cleopatra
,
18
–21

Bare Hills, The
(Winters),
199

Barnes, Djuna,
139

Barnett, Lincoln,
310

The Universe and Dr. Einstein,
310

Barrault, Jean-Louis,
4
,
11

Barthes, Roland,
xv
,
xviii
,
xix
,
xxii
,
xxiii
,
xxxvi
–xxxviii
,
70
,
252

A Barthes Reader,
xxxvi
S/Z,
xxii

Barthes Reader, A
(Barthes),
xxxvi

Bartram, William,
144
,
145

Travels
,
144

Baudelaire, Charles,
22
,
32
,
55
,
72
,
74
,
79
,
231

Baudrillard, Jean,
91
,
111

Bayreuther Blätter
,
70
,
71

Beat movement,
15

Beatles, the,
74

Beaumarchais, Pierre-Augustin Caron de,
75

Becher, Carl,
56

Beck, Julian,
17

Beer, Thomas,
205

Stephen Crane
,
205

Beethoven, Ludwig van,
21
,
73

Fifth Symphony
,
21
,
46
,
50

Ninth Symphony
,
57
,
61
,
65

Being and Time
(Heidegger),
209

Belgrave, Cynthia,
1

Benét, Steven Vincent,
209
,
224
,
John Brown's Body
,
209
,
224

Benét, William Rose,
209
,
224

Benjamin, Walter,
xxviii
,
33
,
76
,
78
,
160