Emerson and the Poetics of Metonymy

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.

pragmatic whitman

Pragmatic Whitman, Stephen John Mack

available at Whitman Archive

9: Whitman’s metonymy–also tied (by Hollis) to illocutionary/performative

metonymy’s association with the sensual, concrete, particular, the physical vs. the intellectualized abstraction of metaphor

18: pragmatic conception of truth (vs. correspondence theory) prominent in LG–whitman anticipates james and dewey; pragmatic dimension to his poetics. evident in his treatment of futurity: poet where th future becomes present. future as an edited and reconstructed version of present

22: pragmatic prophecy/vision

constructed; like James: pragmatism as methodology, not philosophy. vision that understands the future it names is a contingent one: continuously construct, test and reconstruct our representations

on whitman’s ‘open road”

Dewey hints at this interrelationship in “The Development of American Pragmatism”: “Pragmatism thus has a metaphysical implication. The doctrine of the value of consequences leads us to take the future into consideration [which in turn] leads us to the conception of a universe which is, in James’ term ‘in the making,’ ‘in the process of becoming,’ of a universe up to a certain point still plastic.” ⁶ Dewey’s writings suggest that he regarded “pragmatism” and “democracy” to be terms that described different aspects of the same reality: whereas pragmatism describes the philosophical (and metaphysical) assumptions that warrant democratic life, democracy describes the way humans should—and sometimes do—translate these assumptions into institutional form. For Whitman, democracy was sufficient to describe it all. Simply change Dewey’s “pragmatism” in the preceding quote to “democracy” and we have a fairly good statement of Whitman’s own philosophy.

key issue for dewey and mead and james: mutual modification of subject and its environment:

In effect, Whitman has dramatized in poetry the same relationship between sense and mind that Dewey articulated in “The Reflex Arc Concept in Psychology,” the essay that provided the foundation for Mead’s theory of socialized identity. ⁸ There Dewey argued for an organic conception of experience and consciousness. Challenging the simplistic formulations of his contemporary psychologists who assumed that actions were always a response to some external stimulus, Dewey asserted that both stimulus and response should be viewed as mutually modifying acts within a coordinated behavioral circuit.

rethinks the optimism of pragmatism and Whtiman–by way of its tragic sense

One of the complaints that is often heard about Whitman’s poetry concerns what some regard as its cloying optimism. The same complaint, elevated to the status of criticism, is often leveled at pragmatic philosophy. The assumption is that they are both so exceedingly temperamentally optimistic that they naively reduce the complex, tragic, and ultimately insoluble mystery of existence either to a “problem” perfectly amenable to earnestly applied intelligence or to a happy scenario of evolutionary progress.

pragmatism as action:

Action is at the heart of Whitman’s pragmatism, as it is at the heart of pragmatic theory generally. It is the same pragmatic impulse, for instance, that prompted Emerson to observe in “Experience” that at Brook Farm “the noblest theory of life sat on the noblest figures of young men and maidens, quite powerless and melancholy. It would not rake or pitch a ton of hay; it would not rub down a horse; and the men and maidens it left pale and hungry.” ⁸ It is the same instinct that lay behind William James’s claim in Pragmatism that “the possession of true thoughts means everywhere the possession of invaluable instruments of action.” ⁹ Pragmatic thinkers have characteristically held that, fundamentally, life is an activity before it is or can be anything else. Whitman’s stress on the physical, the capacity of the self to act, serves to remind us that quality in life derives in part from an ability to generate and control the activity of living.

connection to dewey in whitman’s notion of the education process in DV

Whitman’s caveat that self-governance is only possible once an individual has been “properly train’d in sanest, highest freedom” also requires some explanation. Read out of context, it might appear that Whitman has resolved Carlyle’s complaint by constructing a deus ex machina by which democracy is stabilized by expert tutelage from without. How, and by whom, is the individual to be trained? Whitman’s initial answer seems to acknowledge the need for a bureaucracy of experts: “I say the mission of government . . . is not repression alone,” he writes, “and not authority alone, . . . [but] to train communities through all their grades, beginning with individuals and ending there again, to rule themselves” (PW 380). It soon becomes clear that Whitman does not have in mind state-sponsored instruction in the political arts; rather, he is describing the way democratic government functions as an educative experience. Since people are educated for self-governance (on both social and individual levels) only through the practice of self-governance, government’s most profound mission is to maintain itself as that vehicle of training. He writes that “political democracy, as it exists and practically works in America, with all its threatening evils, supplies a training-school for making first-class men. It is life’s gymnasium, not of good only, but of all” (PW 385). This is precisely the same point that Michael Walzer makes in his defense of multiculturalism: “[i]ndividuals are stronger, more confident, more savvy,” he observes, “when they are participants in a common life, responsible to and for other people. . . . It is only in the context of associational activity that individuals learn to deliberate, argue, make decisions, and take responsibility.” ¹⁰ This is exactly the dynamic expressed by Dewey’s maxim that human knowledge is a function of the laboring process. “The exacting conditions imposed by nature that have to be observed in order that work be carried through to success,” Dewey writes, “are the source of all noting and recording of nature’s doings” (EN 102).

Whitman’s democratic models of self and society are connected through their interdependence: both are developmental, and each requires the energies of the other for its own development. Democracy is the process by which self and society nurture each other’s growth. True to his pragmatic sensibility, in other words, democracy is for Whitman what philosophy is for William James and experience is for John Dewey—a method. As such, it must forever look to the future it wishes to make better. He writes, “I submit, therefore, that the fruition of democracy, on aught like a grand scale, resides altogether in the future” (PW 390). This is an important feature of Democratic Vistas, but it should also serve as a corrective to some modern critical appraisals. Some recent critics have interpreted Whitman’s turn to the future as a measure of psychological compensation. David Reynolds, for example, writes in his cultural biography of the poet that “his evolutionary framework allowed him to deflect things to the future, and, simultaneously, to accept even the less promising facets of the present.” ¹¹ Perhaps. But if the suggestion is that the futurist orientation of Democratic Vistas is only significant as evidence of Whitman’s desperate (and pathetic) struggle to preserve his faith in a failed democracy, then the view is misguided. Democratic Vistas only makes explicit a view of process and the future that had been latent, implicit, and developing from the first edition of Leaves of Grass (as I attempted to make clear in my discussions of “Song of Myself ” and “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry”). However much this insight may have been nurtured by psychological need, it was also necessitated by the evolving logic of his own philosophy. “Thus,” he concludes, “we presume to write, as it were, upon things that exist not, and travel by maps yet unmade, and a blank” (PW 391). In so saying, he not only describes all those who have written in the pragmatic tradition, such as Emerson, James, and Dewey, but also all who are moved to speculate on the meaning of democratic life.

other keys for pragmatism (Dewey): vision of associative life, association

[note: doesn't connect this 'method' with connotations of medium and communication--wonder about the implications of the reader, not the book, being complete]

metonymy: thoreau

My thoughts on metonymy and Thoreau and metaphor, from my Environmental Writing course.