Review: ‘The modes of modern writing: metaphor, metonymy,
and the typology of modern literature’
by David Lodge (Ithaca, New York, Cornell University Press, 1977. 279 pp. £9.50)
I can see
it now. I am going to be sent to hell when I die, what with the this and the
that, deeds and misdeeds, and it will be bad indeed. There will be things like
pitchforks and brimstone, vulgarity and embarrassment, wall-to-wall bureaucracy
and inefficiency, and—given the specific gravity of my sins of blasphemy - a
particular figure: Mister (but sometimes Major and sometimes Ms.) Malacoda, let
us say, forcing me, kalpa after kalpa, to pay careful and sympathetic attention
to an endless lecture called something like ‘Beyond the Structuralist Myth of
Écriture.’ Now and then, screaming ‘I am Tarn!’ into me, all ears for the
moment, s/he (as depersons are called) will tattoo me, all skin for the moment,
with sentences; I will be sentenced: ‘The lovers start as structures for each
other. As the act progresses, they sparagmatize vis á vis of each other
into a kaleidoscope of bodily parts.’ There will come, after exponential
millions of nightmares, a coffee break, and Malacoda-Tarn and I will stand in
line together. I will whine, ‘Could you, sir or madam, at least replace the
infernal acute accent in vis a vis with a grave?’
After a
sub-eternity of putting up with puns on my last word, I will be shown the
library ‘wing’ of Pandepersonium, a billion books with the titles wrong,
everything misfiled, every square centimetre of every margin covered in idiots’
ballpoint glosses, irony, nature, oh yeh? and i.e. Mauberly and
Elliott’s Wasteland (or Finnegan’s Wake!!!). The i.e. will mean e.g. The
head librarian will have one utterance: ‘Kafkaesque, n’est-ce pas?’ I will have
ten seconds to try to find two texts. A fellow wretch will have been instructed
to say to me, ‘I see you’re into textuality.’ Haunted and hounded, I will try
to find a copy of Auden’s ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ because I believe there is something
wrong with a passage—‘when the ages are reverently, passionately waiting’—as
quoted in David Lodge’s The modes of modern writing (198); ditto John
Barth’s ‘Life Story’ ditto ditto ‘Just as he finished doing so, however, his
real life and imaginary mistresses entered his study’ (244-45). But with every
second another deadline is missed, each marked by klieg and klaxon, din and
stench, Tarns sparagmatize me, and it all begins again.
Very well,
then. Lodge’s The modes of modern writing, subtitled metaphor,
metonymy, and the typology of modern literature, strikes flat the thick
rotundity of the world and rolls the flat thing ever more thinly until it is
one axis. The poles of the axis are called Metaphor and Metonymy, because Roman
Jakobson decided that two (out of many) sorts of clinical aphasia suggest that
linguistic conduct is two processes, selection and combination, that may be
physically or psychically damaged. Modes of damage indicate modes of normal
operation—what you can call ordinary or literal discourse as long as you don’t
believe you are describing anything real. This ordinary discourse, style degree
zero, is pushed toward one pole or the other by various pressures, so that the
fundamental question addresses the means by which and through which a speaker
passes from one topic to another: by association-contiguity-syntagmaticality or
by analogy-dissimilarity-paradigmaticality? Then, by some systematic or chaotic
wrenching of terms, you can call any piece of discourse metaphoric or metonymic
and you can generalize indefinitely by aligning any binary distinction with the
imaginary distinction between metaphor and metonym. Lodge opens his last
chapter with a crisp summary: ‘The history of modern English literature, it has
been suggested in the foregoing chapters, can be seen as an oscillation in the
practice of writing between polarized clusters of attitudes and techniques:
modernist, symbolist or mythopeic, writerly and metaphoric on the one hand;
antimodernist, realistic, readerly and metonymic on the other.’ This, I take
it, is criticism degree zero, and I suppose you reach such a point (at which
you can say zero about an unlimited number of entities) by assuming early on
that literature is a kind of use of language and that what you say about language
applies—mutandis maybe or maybe not mutatis—to literature, and a
fortiori to poetry at large and to poems verbatim. But literature is
not a kind of use of language, and if you pretend that it is then you find
yourself with a brutally impoverished critical vocabulary limited to one
dimension of a multidimensional art. If language is in focus, then plot and
character and states of mind and feeling will be out of focus and finally, like
the wings of BOAC, viewless.
Ours is a
postpostmodern age of metametacriticism. Hell’s Orientation Period features
outlandish pedants explaining things to us patiently, slowly, loudly, the way
one has to talk to an imbecile or a computer (which is a mechanical imbecile),
repeating the same message, langue versus parole, foregrounding, Saussure and
Lévi-Strauss and Jakobson, midnight Ravens of the spirit pecking out every
light but the neon I LIKE IKE that remains the only ‘text’ ever analyzed
satisfactorily. (Abaddon—the deperson whose name means ‘deconstruction’—hangs
around the card catalogue telling us wretches all about the linguistic and
phenomenological ins and outs of ‘The cat sat on the mat.’ We seem to have got
rid of him for the present by asking for his treatment of this text: ‘There is
my heart-throb deep in a whodunit.’)
Lodge (for
we are getting back to him) works, believe it or not, in two modes. In his
metaphoric mode/mood he theorizes about what is literature and what means
realism; the metaphoric theorizing is balanced and ballasted by metonymic contiguity
to texts, not all of which are ‘made strange’ by such misprints as those that
altered ‘aged’ and ‘wife’ to ‘ages’ and ‘life’ in the passages from Auden and
Barth left back in the Pandepersonium eons ago. The Jakobsonian model of ideal
discourse as a double process of selection (from a paradigm of candidates) and
combination (in some answerable syntactic array) works fine as long as the cat
can sit on the mat but somehow goes permanently haywire with samples taken from
real speech or writing; and Lodge can do nice tricks with metonymic metaphors
and a simile that ‘is, as it were, simultaneously a synecdoche,’ but his
discourse dissolves when it comes into contact with actual instances of
literature. Some imp of the perverse skews the vocabulary (as when
‘perceptively’ is used when ‘perceptibly’ is clearly meant [204]) and certain
historical sequences (as when Auden’s revision of ‘Spain 1937’ is made to look
like an acknowledgement of George Orwell’s complaints in ‘Inside the Whale,’
when the fact is, according to Edward Mendelson, that ‘Auden first published
his revision a month before Orwell published his objection’).
With a
critical apparatus limited to two meagre notions—metaphoric modernism versus
metonymic antimodernism, plus loops and oscillations—Lodge cannot do much at
all with Samuel Beckett, whom he must classify as ‘the first important
postmodernist writer,’ a category neither metaphoric nor metonymic and
therefore only triflingly compatible with Lodge’s version of literary history. Tant
pis.