Given my assertion at the end of the preceding section that meaning is all about order, I’d like to look at five different principles of ordering (I know five’s a lot, but remember my promise at the beginning of the section - this is ALL you need to know). Meaning Line again:

Meaning------------------------------------------------------------Significance

1. Order                                   3. ‘Mixed Economy’                                 5. Disorder

       2. Disorder pretending to be Order            4. Order pretending to be Disorder

Control                                      Collusion                                              Abstension

Rules                                    Contingency                                          No rules

Solid                                                     Sticky                                                    Evanescent

‘Me-ness’ of the world                     ‘Is-ness’ of the world                               ‘Other-ness’    

My World                                   This World                                        Another World

Writer as God                       Writer as Interpreter                            Writer as Conduit

So at the left-hand end we have Order (Principle 1). At the right Disorder (Principle 5). And in the middle Lowell’s position which I can only describe as a sort of ‘mixed economy’ (Principle 3) that owes allegiance to both. THEN we have two gaps to fill in, one between Order and the middle; and another between Disorder and the middle. These, respectively are ‘Disorder pretending to be Order’ (Principle 2) and ‘Order pretending to be Disorder’ (Principle 4).

Now if you read histories of literary theory, you’ll find dozens of ‘-isms’ - Literalism, Empiricism, Nominalism, Imagism, Futurism, Surrealism, Symbolism, Mythicism, Expressionism, Impressionism, Post-Modernism, Structuralism, Pluralism, Vorticism, Absurdism, Realism  to name but a few. Basically, however, they’re all made up of varying combinations of these five principles.

So while we’ll use some of these traditional labels to anchor our argument in what’s gone before, we won’t be slavishly examining every one of them. What we’ll be looking at is not so much how meaning has been perceived to be ordered in literature, so much as the urges that drive the writer’s stylistic movements among these five different possibilities. So rather than viewing meaning from the top down, we’ll be approaching it from the opposite direction, drawing order out of texts rather than fitting theories on top of them.

And then, hopefully, we’ll be able to find out not only where meaning is within a text, but also what it’s doing there and why it’s doing it. We’ll get onto that in a moment, but first, I’d like us to take a look at why writers bother to monkey about with reality at all. Why not just leave it as it is?

So what’s the easiest way to smoke out the writer’s ‘take’ on the world, or how he sets about representing it in his art?

If, as the Russian Formalist critic Roman Jakobson puts it, “Literature is . . . organized violence committed on ordinary speech”, the act of interpretation is simple. [1] As we noted above, all you’ve got  to look at are;

Þ      the ways in which the violence is organized, and

Þ      to what degree the writer’s orchestrated it.

Together, these constitute the writer’s ‘style’. And if sufficient numbers of author’s write in a similar way, with similar aesthetic ambitions, these individual styles coalesce into a ‘genre’ like ‘Realism’ or ‘Symbolism’ (they often end in  ‘-ism’).

 And style’s not just evident in the writer’s choice of language, but also the textual structures that support that language, which we’ll come to later.

So (if you’re a Formalist), all you have to do to start getting the meaning out of a text is subtract ‘ordinary speech’ from the artist’s literary representation of it, and look at the discrepancy between what Ezra Pound called those “book words” (literature),  and the “words you can actually say” (ordinary speech). Take the second away from the first and Bingo! the writer’s linguistic style is revealed and with it the way he’s representing his created world. So, if Meaning is ‘C’, Literature is ‘B’ and Reality ‘A’ we can formulate a neat little equation that C = B - A.

The shorter the journey between  A and B, the more direct the communication between form and meaning, the more the writer wants both him and us to ‘understand’; generally speaking, we’re moving from right to left along the Meaning Line in the company of Joan Didion, EM Forster and those writers who choose to compose their work in more or less conventional prose. Or in the direction of what Robert Lowell calls “unsophistication”.

The longer the journey, the further we’re moving from left to right, against the current of formal understanding, and towards Lowell’s concept of the “imbecilic”. If that’s the case, more metaphorical the writer’s meaning is likely to be, and the harder we’ll have to work as readers to get it out. If, indeed, we can get it out at all.

We go through these journeys up and down the Meaning Line all the time when reading literature, often without knowing we’re doing it.

Take something as simple as a single metaphor:

We know that someone who calls a spade a “portable excavation implement” is a somewhat literal-minded individual who doesn’t want you to misunderstand what he means by ‘spade’ - so that’s a pretty short journey between metaphor and meaning, but one which might have its uses. After all, if you stumble across Colin MacInnes’s novel set in the Notting Hill of the 1950’s, ‘City of Spades’, you might think it has more to do with ironmongery than black guys. Which would be wrong. And in the Quartermaster’s store at any army depot, you’ll see crates labelled “Cutlery: Assorted: Knifes, Forks, Spoons. Eating. For the Use Of,” which, while not a metaphor, leaves you in no doubt that these sorts of knives aren’t suitable for quietly killing the enemy.

Of course, a cursory visual inspection would indicate this, but then you’d have to open the box. So, at best, this form of periphrasis is purely functional - but at worst, pedantic.

Þ      describing a fish “a gloried denizen of the finny tribe” sees us on a slightly longer, more time-consuming excursion through metaphor, and it’s the sort of purple description a rather affected poet might use (try Gerard Manley Hopkins.) [2] It’s periphrasis that’s decorative without being strictly necessary, and in order to interpret it properly, we need to be aware that fish have fins, so outside knowledge needs to be imported to make the metaphor work;

Þ      calling either a fish or a spade “a snow-capped mountain” means you might never arrive at  journey’s end because the writer’s using an idiolect or indulging in surrealism where form and meaning are almost completely estranged from one another. And, depending where you stand, he’s either challenging our received notions about the world, or taking the piss. A genius or a charlatan.

Ernest Hemingway called this ability to extract ‘true’ meaning from aesthetic strategies his “shit detector” or his “writer’s radar”, for reasons that’ll become apparent in a moment. Ernie most definitely dug holes with spades, caught fish and a writer to whom mountains were large things made of rock.

But in a work of literature there can be multiple linguistic and structural strategies going on. At the same time. And it can be confusing, particularly if the reader isn’t connecting with the text. He’ll wish these aesthetic strategies were pared down to the minimum. Calling a spade a spade is just fine if it means the difference between getting into a work of literature or being forced to abandon it as incomprehensible.

But if we believe Orwell, writers all have individual styles and strategies, because the natural inclination of literature is to recast the world in the writer’s image. And according to the Formalists, the writer does this to stop what he writes being boring, both to him and to us. Otherwise he might as well be writing an efficient form of purely functional prose, and where’s the interest in that?

Although not a Formalist, the poet Robert Frost would have agreed; all the fun in poetry, he reckoned, “comes from how you say a thing,” although you did have certain obligations to make yourself understood. Edgar Allan Poe reckoned style was a collection of the writer’s “mental idiosyncracies”, and Matthew Arnold muttered darkly about the necessity for “simplicity” and “severity” in your depiction of the world. So the long and short of it is - a writer’s style is a tension between how the world “is” and how he represents it in his work. But why travel outside reality at all? Why not just describe what he sees? The answer is that the writer is that by adopting a style, he is, paradoxically, re-connecting the rest of us with reality by jolting us out of our complacent patterns of perception. He’s bullying our conceptions. Or indeed our pre-conceptions.

Footnotes:

1. By using Formalism as a model I don’t wish to imply it’s the best or only way to examine literature; it’s simply that Formalism is a useful stalking horse for what we’re going to be looking at in this section, as it addresses many themes central  to the nature of artistic representation. The Formalists emerged in Russia in the years prior to the 1917 revolution and flourished throughout the 1920’s until Stalin effectively silenced them. Important members of the group included Roman Jakobson, Viktor Shklovsky, Boris Eichenbaum and Boris Tomashevsky. See http://www.kristisiegel.com/theory for a useful overview.