I gave a talk today on “Emerson and the Poetics of Metonymy.” In a series called “Tea and Talk” at the Lit House at Washington College. I noted that ‘talk’ is metonymy, or what I called good metonymy: that is, a reference to the fact that the emphasis was on talking through–that “talks” (the noun, the scholarly convention) are based in talk, in talking. And that I was thus taking them up on that occasion, and would follow suit by talking through, not read from a paper.
And as I forewarned, though this might have kept things metonymically lively–talking through the process of my thinking, using only notes–there are complications and implications for understanding. Namely, in all the compression and reduction, I left things out.
What I might have added, perhaps to clarify:
Essay is another good example of scholarly (forgotten, or buried) metonymy–now dead metaphor. Essays begin as verbs, as attempts. Emerson knows this, “essaying to be.” And this means essays are unfinished.
In one of his most beautiful essays, Emerson writes (from which I got the title for the talk, and forgot to give the context): “I know better than to claim any completeness for my picture. I am a fragment and this is a fragment of me.”
It is a picture–and a figuring–of metonymy, if not by way of it (one thought after: it is not so much that Emerson writes with metonymy as thinks through it; that often in his very descriptions of writing or thinking as metonymy, he also does so metaphorically). Emerson’s this is key: think linguistic shifter, index–the world of his thought, all its reference, condensed into this writing, this thinking; all in each.
And the problem, so far as I can say it, is that metaphor, conventionally, doesn’t like this. Poems, if we think of conventions of organic or organizing metaphor, founder on “this.”
I also neglected to give two of the examples of metaphor I had collected. One from Emerson, of great importance: nature is the hand of the mind (from Nature). The ‘hand’ is in my view the metonymic figure of figures. And it is one specific way to get from Emerson to Dewey (and reminds me, part of an interest in this project, is to get into Dewey and read ‘metonymy’ in his notions of ‘hand-work’ and doing.)
The other example: Tarrantino describing the end of his most recent film, Inglorious Basterds–the plot device where the cinema is set to flames by burning a nitrate film strip. He says on NPR: it is a ‘juicy metaphor’ but it is also literal–because the film is actually burning the theater. I am intrigued by the fact that he has metaphor, but when he needs it, there is no ‘metonymy’ to access for the conversation (what he is talking about; the appearance of film or photography in film is metonymic). The catch, however, is that the metonymic burning of film isn’t ‘literal.’ It remains figural: its metonymy means it is material and contextual, but not merely literal (if that means the opposite, in some way, of the imaginative).
Mark Nowak asked a good question, noting that metonymy, by definition at least, emphasizes noun–and the naming we associate with nouns. Whereas for Emerson, at least as I was arguing, the focus is on action and process–what we would associate with verb. When does it change, at least for Emerson? It strikes me that this might be a good way to get also at the change I show: when early on Emerson (in Nature) refers by name to the ‘metaphor’ and metaphoricity of all language and nature (metaphor of human mind)–when he really means nature’s metonymy. It is only later, in the 1850s, with “Poetry and Imagination,” that he uses (as I argue) the more fitting name “metonymy.”
I wonder if one way to track that change, historically and contextually, would be to recognize that he is also shifting in the later use to a disucssion of rhetoric; whereas earlier he is thinking more of a poetic. And I wonder if this difference and even tension between the poetic and the rhetorical, which seems to be a version of the tension between metaphor and metonymy, can be mapped onto changes and transitions in American schooling, in shifts from belles lettres as the model, to a rhetoric of composition.
Finally, I forgot to mention–or should I say, in the spirit of the thought, my Emerson (metonymic) attention span didn’t makes it way to–the exploration of metonymy and what it might mean for writing or learning or scholarship that I am haltingly pursuing here. If you google “Emerson and Metonymy,” I might have said, some posts from this blog, this dumping ground (Emerson’s savings bank journal ‘wide world’ digitalized), appear high on the list. Might that now be a good way for a scholar to know that there is room to disseminate his thoughts? Little else is out there. Or a sign that there is no one there to receive the message? [another dynamic relation I might have mentioned: dissemination vs. dialogue, John Durham Peters]
a PMLA article from 1890s discussing metonymy as “necessary relation”
Synecdoche, as Professor Gummere has said, is based upon a relation of space,—what Professor Fruit has termed intra-relativity,—the relation of the whole and its parts; from this figure it is only a short step to Metonymy, which is based upon a relation of thought,—what Professor Fruit has termed extrarelativity, or the intuitions of necessary relation. Metonymy names things at a slight remove; instead of naming the thing itself, it names something associated with it, and trusts to the imagination to supply what is not stated,—both the thing unnamed and the relation which bridges the gulf between the two. If the relations are necessary relations, the gulf is not a very wide one; neither in synecdoche nor in metonymy is a serious demand made upon the imagination, though more is, perhaps, required in the case of metonymy.
