Analysis: Baumgärtner and the Brecht Hypothesis

The time has come to test out the theory empirically: I myself in the role of a superreader present to my reader(s) how human consciousness, or the Interpretant in semiotic terms, has Recipient meet Referent in interlocutory reinforcement of a particular structure. Although there is only one lexical surface in a series of words that look the same, non-Aristotelian semantics identifies the structure to which they belong. Three structures have been identified, two of them literary constructs. Since I function predominantly in the role of the critic, beyond a connoisseur appreciating the immediate construal of a text, my primary stance for the two literary constructs will be analytic as, in concretization, I probe their compositional “artistic” values. Second stance, which authenticates a structure, is put to the test especially in this chapter, because one text will be submitted to all structural alternatives. The analysis of this chapter thus differs by being tripartite in application. When adding the two analyses of the following chapters, five in all are to be offered in this applied part of the theory. Each text was selected because a critic quoted it in conjunction with a problem pertinent to non-Aristotelian semantics.

Some other basic differences in procedure governing the three chapters may be mentioned right away. Since the first and last chapters contain German texts, their presentation will be bilingual. Vital aspects of translation are to be treated in the process. Each translation is my own, one of them “official” in the sense that it was published. That difference is mentioned in order to stress that it does not eliminate the problems of translation, which become so acute because selections from two different inventories are forced unnaturally together. Positively viewed, this problem affirms ontic heteronomy, the sphere of language grounded in acts of meaning. The only “universalism” that transcends all languages concerns the content-insensitive structures, just because they are not identified by semantic idiosyncrasies residing in the lexicon. Structures thus take over unilaterally under the same conditions in any translation, but never the concretion of language in a language. In the final chapter, optional units such as title and stanza that were listed for one of the structures, the Rheme, are also given their due.

The first analysis on which I am now embarking violates the esthetic ought by not authenticating the construct right away. Though to be avoided in general, this violation has the didactic advantage of demonstrating to the reader that the same surface no longer bears the same essence when the structure differs. That was the main challenge of non-Aristotelian semantics all along, and it has to be the concern of every modern critic of language who realizes, surely, that lexical deviance is as omnipresent as any standard language literary works in turn may bear on their surface. In essence, then, the first analysis is a type of experiment. But in its very attempt and ultimate proof it counters the Ingendahl Experiment, for example, whose results proved inconclusive because instead of considering holistic functions, mere localized spotsighting of metaphorical deviance became the focus.

My experiment first substantiates the presence of Argument as everyday or literal meaning, then Dicent as fictional alternative, and lastly the Rheme, the lyric construct bearing a functional metaphor. That my experiment is attempted at all may be justified on the following grounds. First, the critic involved seized on an excerpt only. He thereby created an artificial situation from the start which could be adapted more readily to the hypothesis that the vestige belonged to one structure at a time. Since Dicent, with a certain length mandatory for mimetic augmentation, cannot be presented in its entirety anyway, it may as well be tested with an excerpt. The plan is thus to entertain two hypotheses with Argument and Dicent and then to conclude with the authenticated structure, the Rheme. The English translation will do for the hypotheses after I have offered the whole bilingual version of the excerpt. With the authenticated structure, however, the bilingual version returns, crucial as the original remains for the non-adequated M-base of the Rheme.

That the translator becomes a type of “pseudo-Referent” or locutionary “interloper” has been indicated before. Especially a reader of literary texts should be allowed to glean the “natural” Referent of the original next to the translation wherever possible. Of course, the issue of translatability in itself is important for any investigation into metaphor, because critics at large make it a kind of test for the presence of metaphor and/or literary language. That type of substantiation goes too far and, again, is tacitly a deviance cult. Taken literally, a translation always resembles a “transference” based on a shift that goes from one oppositional system to another. Not only in the role of translator, however, but also as critic do I have to intervene between Referent and Recipient as I, the concretizing Recipient, pass on in turn my construal to readers who concretize my own (adequated, critical) work here. Instead of merely decoding connotations, for example, I have to render them artificially in explicit denominations in order to talk about them.

The critic who brought up the excerpt for the first analysis is none other than Baumgärtner, whose pessimistic essay on what was essentially a nonexistent methodological status of a linguistic poetics was cited before. Baumgärtner, it will be remembered, also echoed Fowler on those “formal features” that simply would not appear to accomodate a linguist grappling with poetic language. Part of Baumgärtner’s proof, therefore, is an excerpted prosaic looking poem by Brecht (1969, p. 29) which he goes on to label a hybrid, in German “Zwitterding.” Since Baumgärtner wants to prove that, if one did not know Brecht had ordained the text as poem, no one could tell that it was not a newspaper item, he seems partially justified in severing the full context this way: without any of the surrounding evidence, the language might be a feuilletonistic fragment.

The very setting reminds of the Ingendahl Experiment since that critic, too, drew on a newspaper article in determining its metaphorical content. So here is a poem which could in fact be part of everyday language because no special metaphorical deviance is evident in the style. That Baumgärtner equates such evidence with metaphor becomes only too apparent when, after citing the hybrid (ibid., pp. 38 ff.), he culls “transfer” from localized (spotsighted) lexical items, where “woods” are “sleeping” or “sleepy.” Again, then, a modern critic is preoccupied with such rudimentary phenomena of meaning as animation that ancient rhetoric has plied to little avail for centuries. I cite the contents because “wood(s)” featured in my illustrations of the variegated natural leaps of language. These leaps, however, were identified as being intrinsic to all semantic entities because they arise from a functional instead of lexical transference any time an act of meaning is expressed through selected meanings.

With Baumgärtner’s interest in lexical phenomena, then, it should come as no surprise that the ordinary looking Brecht excerpt baffled this critic. As shown in the (first) bilingual version to be cited, a deviant surface is hardly in evidence.

Auf der Flucht vor meinen Landsleuten

Bin ich nun nach Finnland gelangt. Freunde

Die ich gestern nicht kannte, stellten mir ein paar Betten

In saubere Zimmer. . . .

In flight from my countrymen

I finally got to Finland. Friends

That I didn’t know yesterday put a few beds for me

Into clean rooms. . . .

The ellipsis points indicate where the poem was cut. Brecht’s original work came in a volume entitled “Poems” (Gedichte, 1961. IV, pp. 220-222), with the dates “1934-1941.” The poem had a title, “1940,” and consisted of eight prosaic looking stanzas of varied length, identified by Roman numerals. Baumgärtner’s excerpt opens the last stanza, “VIII,” which consists of eight lines altogether. In fact, the fourth line above is incomplete: where the ellipsis points appear, the text continues with “Im Lautsprecher”--”In the loudspeaker.” The enjambement would have left this vestige dangling in the excerpt and was no doubt omitted for that reason. In the way of additional background information, the poem is part of a cycle labeled “‘Steffinische’ Collection,” in tribute to Brecht’s collaborator Margarethe Steffin (who died in exile, in 1941; ibid., pp. 229-231).

That much information--none of which Baumgärtner offers--seems fair to include, some of it in anticipation of the authenticated structure that is to be analyzed last. Although Baumgärtner may have seemed justified to quote an excerpt in order to underscore its prosaic appearance, he nevertheless stoops to the “anachronism” he cited from Jakobson by seeming so “unconversant” with literary scholarship that he could not even provide some documentation.

At this point, the first hypothesis is ready to be presented. While non-Aristotelian semantics does not go in for hybrids, the prosaic appearance is to be substantiated first by treating the text as though it were functionally “literal” or univocal and thus belonged exclusively to Argument. On the surface the words look the same, but they are now borne by a syntactic correlate which, through adequation with an objective referent, gives rise to linguistic judgment, hence to a unit(y) backed by a reality-nexus supporting truth claims. The author willing this use cannot be a novelist or poet, but instead the writer of a letter, perhaps, that contains information about himself--and I use the masculine in cognizance of Brecht despite the present hypothesis. Although Argument may be ostensive, my own written communication causes me to continue stressing the orthographic foundation rather than the purely sonorous one. With that perspective in mind, I include a graphic line to suggest a type of “frame” for the edges of a page. Although Argument is versified in some commercial use as stated, the idea is to preserve the “prosaic” nature of these words without making any changes. The words seem to spill over naturally onto the next line, yet they do not fit perfectly: the “I” of the second line could have been included with the first and, of course, the “Friends” are left dangling in the enjambement, since only one translated correlate is to be offered for this first experiment.

.................................................

In flight from my countrymen

I finally got to Finland. Friends

By coincidence, the first line includes the possessive about which much was said while going into Ingarden’s adequated “pen” sentence. Were the use here ostensive, this “my” could be rounded out by the face of a speaker, perhaps Brecht’s before he died in 1956. A person like Brecht as real speaker would be talking about himself, and since I vowed to concentrate mostly on written language, such a person could jot down these experiences. Indeed, someone of Brecht’s stature could have such a letter (or inverview) published also as newspaper item. None of these conditions detract from Argument and its truth claims, even if they were met negatively by being a lie, perhaps in fear of censorship, to protect the “friends” cited. In Kate Hamburger’s possible division for statements (1968, pp. 41-44, trans., 1973, pp. 40-44), such a letter actually written by Brecht is the work of a “historical subject.”

I gave my reason for shying away from such added categories in Argument since they only end up describing content. The important point is that the function of Argument, adequation, supervenes the content as a particular mode of contextualization. Argument rules that this correlate, after nominal-verbal unfolding and interlocking, becomes juxtaposed with the kind of objective content the pure referent conveys. That is to say, Argument as pure referent starts in (the former circle marked) language, because only linguistic competence can amalgamate meanings into a unified meaning. This particular correlate is (hypotactically) twisted: its subject, the “I”--to be termed the “pronominal hero”--is preceded by a syntactic modifier consisting of two prepositional phrases, of which the second contains a possessive in the grammatical first person that matches the subject.

Significantly, this syntactic deferral complements Iconic timing, since flight and escape from the “countrymen” would precede arrival in Finland, the country of exile. The deictic adverb “finally” becomes the explicit element of Iconic time to reinforce that temporal order. Within the whole syntagma of this correlate, the pronominal hero seems sourrounded by prepositional phrases. In some respects one can glean, too, what Ingarden had in mind when his syntactic hierarchy placed nouns in first constitutive place for their “objectification of the meant.” Even though these are noun-objects, with “flight . . . countrymen . . . Finland” tied to their prepositions “In . . . from . . . to,” they seem to carry the brunt of the constitution by rendering in full the escape from foes and the safe arrival. By comparison, the subject-pronoun “I,” as befits its name “pro-noun,” remains a function word, an operative sign, whose schematic material content bears an intrinsic pointer or direction-factor that has been delimited considerably in semantic range.

What I just offered is a very careful description of the correlate as pure referent. In an emergency situational context, the urgency would cause adequation with an objective referent to be enormously fast. Thus the readers of these contents in a letter, who may be friends or relatives anxious to get the good news, would force the “I” swiftly into adequation with the known sender of the letter, rounding off this pronoun with his very person and appearance. The fact that he not only got away but has safely reached his destination and was accorded a welcome takes precedence over the forming of words. All attention is thus on the reality-nexus, the news value of the message, and on the “truth” in view of this vital information. Put scientifically in terms of non-Aristotelian semantics, the depletion or perforation of the pure referent has occurred; any fancy rhyme would be penetrated just as swiftly, adding perhaps a lighter touch by suggesting that the person had developed sufficent distance from the harrowing experience to gloss it over like that. Even if this author is not backed up the way the “pen” was on my diagram by a graphic “doppelganger,” the “I” pointer becomes stabilized through the familiarity with the real individual who hovers behind these contents as writer of the note.

In short, for Argument, the pragmatic message supersedes pure meaning, to the point of permitting the paraphrase. Should others want to know the gist of this letter, they could be given a shorter version of this correlate, as long as it conveyed at the level of the objective referent the safe escape. At the same time, the superreader Recipient who is a critic of language and not emotionally involved in this particular situation also understands that in paraphrasing there has been tampering with the pure referent; the new “phrasing” changes nominal-verbal unfolding and interlocking. That goes for any of the constituents: a different Referent (I) is being corporealized in reference (M) and embodied in transference (0). The actual wording, then, never tolerates any interference in the (thetic) closure of I-M-0 generation. The point is simply that since the objective referent has priority here, it wins.

The objective referent wins to the point of dating the message through the adverb “finally”; it also localizes “Finland” on a map: readers may check their watches (although in those days they did not register dates) and look up the country. A superreader as critic, however, realizes that “Finland” at the level of the pure referent stays on a “ground” regulated by Qualisign dimensions. When thus alerted, a Recipient notices the different spelling for German “Finnland.” No matter how minuscule the distinction, behind it lies the regulative power of language in a language, as first pointed out with the onomatopoetic rooster and cuckoo cries. What makes the constituents of this text structurally “literal” and not “metaphorical” like those of the Rheme is a univocality that comes from their projection “out into” a reality-nexus.

This univocality applies also to the “countrymen.” At the level of the pure referent, they have no human identity, no face or body. Curiously, English sounds as though sex is there, but competent native speakers recognize that “men” is a sexist remnant of English, whose plural usually does not necessarily divulge gender but in any generic context lets the male dominate, even if more women speakers may share the language. All one learns through the possessive “my” accompanying these compatriots is that they are of the same nationality as the pronominal hero. However, if the title of the whole poem, “1940,” is to be taken as the real situational context applicable to the fleeing Brecht, the objective referent warrants the import “Nazis,” as it would to the Recipients of Brecht’s letter. Not until I get to the non-adequated structures, where the pure referent is all, will my reason for choosing “countrymen” rather than “compatriots” emerge.

Well, my second hypothesis is at hand to change all the priorities just elucidated. When these words belong to Dicent, they form a non-adequated syntactic correlate which abides by the pure referent only. As quasi-judgment, this correlate becomes the literary alternative to “literal” Argument, or plain “judgment.” For the mimetic augmentation that is the fictional base of Dicent, at least both the translated correlates covering the excerpt have to be included. The very condition of augmentation, however, necessitates a hypothesis for this illustration, since even two correlates would not suffice for Dicent. The assumption is now that the two correlates open a novel, or drama. Since “performance” has to be confined to acts of decoding, the written novel works best, yet not without the reminder that the Dicentic construct comprises any short story, versified epic or ballad, for example.

All formats bearing plots become subsumed under the “fiction” of Dicent for sharing in a mimetic augmentation which is meted out piecemeal through unfolding and concatenating correlates. The primary issue is not how many formats can be drummed up, but what is entailed in the semantic functioning that causes plots to shape when the lexicon here stays unaltered aside from extending to encompass two correlates. Because Dicent may be in verse, the graphic “frame” is omitted this time. Still, to maintain closest surface fidelity with the former structure, the insinuation tends in the direction of prose and thus toward spatial confines of a page rather than a poetic line.

In flight from my countrymen

I finally got to Finland. Friends

That I didn’t know yesterday put a few beds for me

Into clean rooms. . . .

The two sentences may compose a letter which now opens a novel as part of the exposition. The superreader authenticates Dicent in second stance, meeting the esthetic ought of this construct and its imperative of plot formation. Perhaps the authorial will is made explicit by a title and/or subtitle. But whether or not a “novel” becomes announced in so many words, there are indicators that fiction obtains for the construct. The Recipient is hardly a pal of the author concerned with the latter’s personal well-being. That is not the reason for concretizing these correlates. If it is, Argument will obtain, to the detriment of Dicent, naturally. No matter how autobiographical the novel containing these two sentences, the Recipient does not involve the real Brecht in content alignment with a reality-nexus but only as constitutive consciousness of a plot; the Referent to be sought resides in a “story” the correlates bring forth in the “telling” that I identified with the very term “Dicent.” There is no “ulterior” motive of juxtaposing the pure with an objective referent. While syntax prevails in seemingly forming the “judgment” part of each correlate with nominal-verbal unfolding and interlocking, the “quasi-”prefix underscores a pure referent that presents a simulated world from what Icons mirror and hold Indexically, beginning in a vacuum at zero-point.

Instead of the perforation characteristic of Argument, closure obtains not only for each constitutive unit(y) but the entire work that arises piecemeal and cumulatively from the correlates in their unfolding and progressive concatenation. “Closure” becomes a mimetic enclave or “enclosure”-if not on the order of the “pen” that came up with Ingarden’s example. Leaning back for a moment in a wholly analytic (or pre-esthetic) stance, the superreader as critic of language may note the mottled surface of the non adequated correlate, disclosing that curious tachistic and finite disposition Ingarden had noted. It attests to the selectional bias of a pure correlate that stays non-adequated, hence without the backing of a reality-nexus. Simultaneously, there are the indeterminate and yet elastic “pockets.” As a part of the dynamic and natural ambiguity of linguistic meanings, these pockets fill out during concretization. The schematic, laconic pronominal hero as an “I” would be a rather conspicuous case in point, even if all material contents of Icons in their heteronomous makeup remain schematic, as explained.

My analysis so far has covered a description of the linguistic strata that carry semantic thresholds and unities, although observed with an eye on the two literary strata that yield presented objects in the precise aspects the Icons and Indexes submitted. After all, Argument was said to carry the first two strata as well, much as they become depleted through the reorientation to a reality-nexus. In Dicent, however, what the correlates own at the moment of unfolding reinforces thematically what their concatenation will knit together. Thus the pronominal hero may count as the protagonist while “his” possible antagonists erupt as the felonious “countrymen” chasing him. Their faceless, sexless, and curiously sexist nature has been revealed already and needs no reiteration. Through the “my” possessive, these antagonists gain a certain aspect that links them dissociatively to the protagonist, since he has to flee from them when he should belong to them. Iliocutionary force may go into the “my” as the hurt experienced at the hands of these infamous pursuers. Ingarden’s “metaphysical qualities” may be pertinent here, necessitating a special intonation of bitterness, perhaps, in a dramatic performance of a character reading this letter on stage.

These “analytic” observations bring me back to the superreader who now operates as “connoisseur” by being locked into the Icons that unravel with each unfolding correlate in turn at the horizontal sequence. The first correlate plunges the Recipient into medias res with respect to the “flight” and escape of the pronominal hero from his “countrymen.” So here meaning comes before the urgent message carrying factual “news.” Instead, the Icons “urge” a Recipient on to discover why the pronominal hero had to flee--perhaps with subsequent correlates going into flashbacks--and who the pursuers really are. Nothing can be taken for granted that does not come with the explicit and implicit denomination of words.

The second correlate, however, does not delve into the hero’s past but continues with the (fictional) present. The “Friends,” presumably of “Finland,” emerge as “new” characters and oppose the compatriot foes in that very Icon of benevolence. Unlike the pursuers to whom the hero should belong, as the “my” suggested, the “Friends” were not even known “yesterday,” before the arrival in Finland, and yet they demonstrate a sense of responsibility toward the hero. That is to say, the “Friends” that initiate the second correlate as noun-subject show their initiative to full advantage as they take over the action which erupts into the kind deed of providing shelter with the furniture described. Indirectly, the “Friends” are reaffirmed by the relative pronoun “That” and this whole clause in content. Unlike the supposedly familiar compatriots from whom the pronominal hero becomes alienated, these foreigners at point of arrival are fast becoming familiar.

In the second correlate, therefore, the recursive direction-factor of the verb “put” bypasses the relative-pronoun clause to interlock with “Friends.” The full predicate then produces the objects in nominal-verbal interlocking, directly for “a few beds” and indirectly for the “clean rooms” as objects of the preposition “Into.” This preposition underscores the feverish activity of the welcoming “Friends.” Curiously, even the adjective “clean” bears part of that action by suggesting the preparation that went into readying these “rooms.” Adjectives, indeed, serve rather conspicuously as reinforcing aspects in the order of “leitmotifs,” just because they can be omitted in nominal-verbal constitution; “beds” and “rooms” would have made the point, but the number in “a few” and the care in “clean” respectively drive home a point. Both individually reinforce the concern of the new friends. The number, tying in with the plural morphemes of “beds” and “rooms,” increases the magnanimity; not only to the singular “I” person in which the hero appears do the friends extend their generosity but also to possible family members and (native) friends.

So one learns through the second correlate that the hero is not alone-for long at any rate. And although the vast geographical space of “Finland” has been narrowed down to the four walls implied by “rooms,” the very fact that this Icon comes in the plural suggests largesse, perhaps on the order of a suite. Space has become explicitly rounded out and simultaneously narrowed down from a geographical location to a man made locus for rest and repose spelling “shelter.” To Iconize that Index, the pronominal hero has found a “roof over his head,” one lovingly readied.

Under Argument, the readers of Brecht’s letter would have known who accompanied Brecht, what family members and/or friends he took with him or would meet there--native German persons, no doubt, instead of the Finnish ones. With the non adequated zero point origin, however, the schematic plural morphemes, beyond reflecting the relatively vague number in the Icons “a few,” keep the reader guessing. The language via the referent drives the concatenation forward. How may these numbers be filled out? Who are these persons still reduced here to plural morphemes? Are they true friends or more treacherous foes, men or women, adults or children? Only other correlates will “tell.” The same applies to the hero, “who” is merely reiterated as “I”-subject in the relative pronoun clause and, outside of it, as an added “me” “for” whom the Finnish friends put themselves out as the Good Samaritans they are. So, certainly, a fascination with this elusive protagonist continues until more emerges from succeeding correlates. In this manner, the unfolding and concatenating correlates combine and, in a curious way, “conspire” by letting out precise Iconic details in some instances while offering only ambiguous Indexical suggestions in others.

All this the very essence of language achieves in the process of natural denoting and connoting, as acts of meaning become expressed through meanings in their own dynamic, heteronomous contents of explicit and implicit denominations. Let the skeptics, Fregean or otherwise, disappear once and for all! Thanks to Ingarden, language as bearer of meaning has found its substance and its function. A simulated world grows from the Qualisign ground and is presented in set Iconic and yet dynamic Indexes at depth, at the level of import. This presented world is replete with instances of time and space involving people and their pleasant or not-so-pleasant preoccupations. Hostile and hospitable characters have begun to appear in nouns and pronouns, in adjectives and (“s”) morphemes rendering their plurality. They are there because the material contents of Icons laid their foundation while their relevant Indexes “filled” them out.

A last note on the “countrymen.” This compounded Icon proves many things, first among these a possible epochal time gap. Supposing this Icon changed in years to come and referred literally to “men from the country” as rural individuals. Of course, that such an Index hardly befits the context should alert a superreader. Hypothetically, though, a Recipient who artificially closes the gap between inception and reception by decoding the “countrymen” wrongly becomes an unwarranted pseudo-Referent by altering authorial intent at 0 in I-M-0 generation. To avoid the problem, a Recipient must return to the inventory from which the selection was made in order to accord the author the proper signitive act that was “meant” by the choice of Icon.

Now, when stating that, “literally,” the Icon refers to “men” from the--and not “a”--“country,” a critic draws on that metalinguistic gesture for punning I had introduced before. The meaning is then “univocal” by skimming only the material, explicit contents of Icons (M). Conversely, one could say that genuine “men” from the “country” were not meant--or meant only “metaphorically” by designating compatriots at depth. Then, in a metalinguistic gesture, a speaker motions to the Index (0). Whatever the case, these gestures can be deployed under Argument or Dicent. In the latter case the speaker is fictive, perhaps the pronominal hero “who” puns in “his” situation. As histrionic “gesture,” anyway, no genuine univocality is involved since Icons are never contextualized without Indexes, and vice versa. Beyond a sheer description of thus skimming Icons, no constitutional unit(y) can tolerate such a split without tearing meaning from the meant, leaving nothing to be “derived” from the selected Icons. Moreover, if the Icon were changed deliberately and/or officially to mitigate the sexism in the compound by switching to “country-persons,” it would date every such appearance. As patent reminder of inception, the Icon would bring the newly accepted choice forward through future reception, much as the Recipient tacitly goes “back” to that “date” in satisfactory construal of the relevant Index.

Just as important for this study of metaphor is the fact that epochal discrepancies affect deviance ratios in future receptions; anything no longer commonplace seems “strange(r).” If, for instance, “countrymen” had been replaced by “countrypersons,” future Recipients encounter the former as an odd expression for compatriots that are only of the masculine gender. All these problems arise with the lexical, content-sensitive type of “metaphor” tradition has plied. “Metaphor” in structural dimensions comes up shortly. Presently, let me list the facets of time that have surfaced thus far: sequential, Iconic, and epochal. Structural time is not to be excluded either. Although it is harder to prove with such short length, enough is there to stress that the two quasi-judgment correlates of Dicent become cumulatively augmented as the quasi-mirror emerges without the direct backing of equivalent existents.

In synchronizing the gradual accumulation between encoded text and decoding concretization, the double horizon forms: “Finland” has emerged as a friendly place of exile, for instance, a hospitable country providing shelter. As more evolves and becomes knit together, this “country” shifts in whatever direction the plot changes, and that could be drastic if the kind persons, for example, turned into traitors after all. In any case, this double horizon will be mitigated after the first heuristic concretization by the full impact of the qualitative time phases that assimilate the construal as it moves along. Retroactive and hermeneutic concretizations should then weight the work with all its significance, permitting its “artistic” compositional merits to evolve as an organic whole. The first-person pronominal hero may then come off indeed as an egocentric person from the start, or whatever. If Dicentic verse applies, as it may here, the final hermeneutic effort of what 1 qualified as the (primary) stance of the “connoisseur” may then work toward full appreciation of the “esthetic values” that result in (Ingarden’s) “polyphony” among the interacting strata.

Polyphony is given its due especially by the third analysis of this chapter, in the structure authenticated by Brecht, the author, and that is the Rheme, whose micro-component is the functional, non-Aristotelian metaphor--of substance and not of deviance! The hypotheses are thus concluded and yet also continued insofar as the authenticated form, the poem, stays reduced to the excerpt Baumgärtner cited. Still non adequated like Dicent, the Rheme additionally breaks with the syntactic correlate and extends instead to the contextual alternative this study has designated “poetic intext.” Meanings then become intensified in their “nominalization” of backgrounding and foregrounding a lyric ego, an outward “totality of expression” toward which each such meaning has contributed as “object of expression.”

For full authentication, the earlier presented background plays a part. Brecht’s poem, I said, was identified as such in the title for the cycle that contained it, inclusive of dates. Its own title, in fact, bore the date “1940.” Despite the poem’s length, greater than the excerpt that covers only the first half of the eighth and last stanza, there is no mimetic augmentation, no genuine “tale” being told about heroes and heroines. As for the excerpt, it now displays its “expressive” rather than fictional nature. One may then get a glimpse of the direct “saying” that Käte Hamburger classed erroneously with any statement in order to contrast lyric poetry with mimetic fashioning. Regardless of the eloquent appearance that lets the “I” person “speak out,” the Rheme through its centripetal lyric ego demands the same separate and self contained “closure” of constitution that Dicent owned and which cuts it off from any adequated statement. This “speaker” is not for real, whether or not the surface looks more “literal” than “lyric.” In one descriptive concession (only), it may be wiser to call the pronominal hero a “lyric I.” But the designation is not synonymous with the Rhemic structural unit(y), the lyric ego. It merely labels surface content. Since this structure was placed at the M-base, the bilingual version returns, with extra space devoted to vital issues of translation.

Auf der Flucht vor meinen Landsleuten

Bin ich nun nach Finnland gelangt. Freunde

Die ich gestern nicht kannte, stellten mir ein paar Betten

In saubere Zimmer. . . .

In flight from my countrymen

I finally got to Finland. Friends

That I didn’t know yesterday put a few beds for me

Into clean rooms. . . .

So here is the text once more--the same words but no longer the same constituents of a construct. Keeping in mind that all the entries are now non-Aristotelian metaphors, the procedure of concretization differs again. The text has to be pieced together directly, with the lines respected rather than the syntactic correlates which were given as optional on the schema of Rhemic hierarchies. Accordingly, the poem is to be analyzed in a tetradic division matching the four lines instead of going by the two correlates.

“Direct” constitution, moreover, applies to the constituents themselves that support each line, just because lines as such surface in the other structures. So what a line bears here must accompany all non adequated and nonmimetic elements that are objects of expression for a totality of expression. Ironically, in that very capacity the function of these constitutents turns so-called function words or operative signs around, into structural nouns, nominalized meanings. As a consequence, these components still are described by their syntactic taxonomy while at depth they remain metaphors and/or functional nouns through the width their intrinsic pointer, the direction-factor, assumes from the task of connotative compounding. Thus I still speak of “prepositions,” for example, to identify the surface but stay conscious of Rhemic synthesis. All elements, in fact, belong to the “metonymic” parts-to-whole coherence which does not go by the lexicon but by the function unique to a constitutional unit(y) that transcends both correlates in this particular text.

Inner connotative compounding must supersede the overt syntagma displaying sentences, and that Rhemic task is carried out at horizontal as well as recursive-vertical levels--“up-and-down,” so to speak, if not in reference to the everyday prepositional metaphors that so intrigued Embler and others in a spatial-to-social reuse. No, what distinguishes these “esthetic”counterparts is that after forming the linguistic strata, they background and foreground poetic intext at the two literary strata, where the lyric ego is pieced together by Icons and interlocking Indexes as coherent import. The processing occurs immanently and not cumulatively.

An analytic approach to basic linguistic dispositions of the Rheme calls for comparing those bilingual aspects that affect construal at the M-base. After that approach, each line will be scrutinized, as the two Dicentic correlates were before. A conspicuous similarity in the bilingual version is the matching relational circumference of lines: they extend in length from one to three and fall off in the fourth line, which the excerpt has curtailed unnaturally. Yet the difference that causes most of the German to appear more elongated than English affirms also the synthetic, inflected nature of the former as compared to the analytic language English represents. Then again the many cognates underscore the Indo-European, “Proto-Germanic” root (Waterman, 1976, pp. 38-51) of both languages, which aids M-base fidelity in retained alliteration for “Flucht” and “Flight,” “Freunde” and “Friends,” “Betten” and “beds.” Yet even these cognates make evident the regulative “coercion” of language in each language with which my study began, and not only with the already mentioned “Fin(n)land,” where the added nasal distinguishes even a place name as belonging to one oppositional inventory. Such a geographical landmark at least keeps the capitalization bilingually, as does the syntactic onset from which the friends are seen to benefit above. In other instances, however, German differs from English by its mandatory capitalization for nouns at one end and often a softer feminine cadence at the other.

Only from the universal perspective of structure does the Rheme dominate both versions equally, just because the function is context-sensitive but not content-sensitive. That is exactly why such designators as “literal” or “metaphorical” can be applied categorically in non-Aristotelian semantics. The loss in content, however, stays a problem particularly for translations of a non-adequated language located at M-base. It forces a translator into the role of an “after-poet,” or “Nachdichter” as the Germans say, not necessarily with a pejorative intent but because the keen sensitivity to content often requires a poet to translate poems.

In my own attempt at the closest “after-poetry,” I now explain why the Icon “countrymen” was chosen instead of the less sexist “compatriots,” for instance. When simply literalized, one gets the starred “*landspeople” English has not indented as compound--any more than the “*fill-feather” of Ingarden’s “pen” example. That is to say, only the segments “land “and “people” are Legisigns. And, although the first segment appears to yield the cognates “Land” and “land,” the German Icon is not only Indexicalized for that elevated patriotic nuance which English can match, but also for “country” in the dual sense of national home and rural area, of which the former applies to the “countrymen.” Thus my choice despite the sexist overtones.

Many other discrepancies cannot be perfectly controlled either. Right away the first prepositional phrase makes known its “national” origin in what linguists (like Chomsky) would call a syntactic subcategorization rule by requiring the (dative-feminine) definite article “der” between preposition and object. That addition right there extends this line further than the English one even before considering the lengthened cadence mentioned, which elongates possessive and noun in (dative plural) to “meinen Landsleuten,” as italicised. The second line bearing the first verb tense as Iconic time becomes elongated because of the German need to use the present perfect in “Bin . . . gelangt” while English keeps the (simple or single) imperfect past with “got.” True, in the next line additions seem reversed insofar as English demands an auxiliary for the emphatic to accompany negation in “didn’t know,” even when thus contracted to preserve the “prosaic” tone that confused Baumgärtner. Also, since English bears no distinctive Sinsign for the dative case, this line had to Iconize an extra preposition with “for me” instead of “mir.”

However, even so, inflected German components lengthen their line further than the English, as shown by the extended plural morphemes of verb and noun in “stellten . . . Betten” compared to the blunt, (masculine) equivalent of “put . . . beds.” The verb, incidentally, literalizes into “stood,” because the German inventory possesses the quirk of having flat objects “lie”--as indicated with Ingarden’s “pen” example--and more vertical ones with (wooden?) legs “stand.” Again, English had to forego that peculiarity at the M-base lest I become indeed a phony “after-poet.” As for the last line, this again forces English into an added prepositional Icon as shown by the pair “ln”/“lnfo,” because otherwise the accusative Index of motion gets left out. In that line, too, the German adjective “saubere” assumes the onus of plurality, Iconized as italicised, because the equivalent noun for “rooms” as “Zimmer” bears a null morpheme for number.

From my general observations above, the irony arises that, surprisingly, it is the prosaic type of language which for the M-base presents the greatest number of strictures if one does not want to over-poeticize by emulating the authorial will. A more outlandish style, particularly of disrupted syntax, permits also more departures of norms for the translation. However, to eliminate the sensation of standard language in the Brecht text not only violates authorial intent but would eradicate the Baumgärtner “hybrid” on whose refutation my tripartite analysis is based. Certainly, these mandatory syntactic changes cause horizontal and vertical proximities to go awry. At the horizontal level, the switch of perfect to imperfect tense has the new hospitable persons closer to their country, as in “Finland. Friends” when compared to the original that separates them with the past participle “gelangt” in typical dependent clause word order. At the vertical level, the same tense change pushes the lyric “ich” or “I” over to commence the second line instead of having the reiterated pronouns hover exactly over one another in recursive reinforcement. I myself no doubt added to that distortion by using “finally” instead of the possible “now” which in Iconic stretch and Sinsign composition might have been closer to the “nun.” But somehow this adverb did not seem to Indexicalize as well in the illocutionary sense of relief that comes out in my choice. So I believe.

A special case of bilingual entanglement is the relative pronoun clause of the third line. Typically, the plural definite article “Die” that German adopts also as relative pronoun initiates the clause. Although punctuation is obligatory for German relative pronoun clauses, the comma after “Freunde” has been omitted in what may be just a modest indication of that “poetic license” the conspicuous prosaic nature of this poem has generally avoided, although it does appear at the end, after the verb “kannte.” Had a comma not gone there, the two finite verbs “kannte” and “stellten” would have been thrust unnaturally together, which is indeed the reason for this punctuation. The strange proximity is caused by the mandatory order of verb-end and verb-second-place for the respective dependent and main clauses, thus forcing two finite verbs of different subjects together as shown, even if “kannte” signals “ich” as subject and “stellten” the plural friends “who” then resume their action within the main clause, much as they determine the plural of the relative pronoun.

English, which is not subject to such word order changes, may thus forego the punctuation stricture for the relative pronoun clause. However, truly amazing is the signitive ramification of its relative pronoun. Four possible choices reside in the oppositional inventory of latent alternatives: (1) null entry; (2) “who”; (3) “whom”; and (4) “that.” What determined my fourth choice in the translation was, again, its casual nuance. The second and third choices do reinforce the “human(e)” aspect of these friends and are generally standardized for persons. But they seemed stilted for the tenor of this poem, in part because they force the translator into deciding between the proper subcategorization “whom” and the looser but more natural sounding “who.” The omission of the first choice might have obviated all those problems. But here is the unexpected result of that choice for the actualized meaning: a vertical anaphora would be created by eliminating the relative pronoun as opening element of the third line, yielding “In”/“I”/“I”/“Into.” Very clever! But again, the translator appears inadvertently to outwit the original creator of the poem--ironically in the very intent to save the style from excess. To be sure, this anaphora would have brought the lyric “I” back into vertical alignment, if in first place, but through a drastic measure.

A modest vestige and so ramified the problems! Whether I have solved them to everyone’s satisfaction is not so much the point as to indicate, positively, the power of ontic heteronomy, the willful sphere of language in a language, despite the universal nature of the structures as such. The differences came about through the ontogenetic origin of Icons and their Indexes, hence in the indentations that resulted from the transaction of reference with transference, from an act of meaning corporealized and embodied by selected explicit and implicit meanings. In the renewed transaction through the extended transference this Rhemic construct acquires, signitive values and their deployment become so uniquely intertwined as structural metaphors that the slightest nuance has serious repercussions. Outwardly, to be sure, the words look like the ones that served Argument and Dicent, but inwardly they now point centripetally toward a holistic lyric ego instead of being driven forward by unfolding correlates. The totality of expression still arises piecemeal from these nominalized meanings, but not progressively. To do justice to this holistic immanence and/or structural present, Ingarden’s assimilative faculty of live memory has to go into effect while following the sequence of the lines, as is to be demonstrated next, beginning with line one:

Auf der Flucht vor meinen Landsleuten

(In flight from my countrymen)

The line obviously splits the sentence into the first two prepositional phrases that usher in flight and escape. While the Iconic feminine cadence in “meinen Landsleuten” seems to reinforce a “togetherness” between the possessive and its compatriots, the flight shatters that connection in sense, releasing “enemy,” or “hostility” in my attempt here to Iconize this Index. The two nominalized prepositions “Auf” and “vor” add respectively the nuance of a flight in progress and a need to get away “from” the compatriots in pursuit. When observing a further analytic distance, the critic notices a curious Iconic reversal: on the surface the flight is cited first and the pursuers last, whereas in meaning the pursuers are the very cause for flight. With the second line,

Bin ich nun nach Finnland gelangt. Freunde

(I finally got to Finland. Friends)

the hostile pursuers are cut off sharply as the auxiliary verb “Bin,” in agreement with “ich,” also ushers in the lyric “I,” the subject, in completion of this correlate. With the “nun nach,” time and space appear in Icons and alliterate as Sinsign composites. English could not match that, even if I had settled for “now” instead of “finally.” And the perfect-to-imperfect tense change (discussed) severs that proximity anyway, should “now” have matched the nasal Qualisign of the spatial “to.” German “nach” as vocable, incidentally, also bears the temporal signifier “after,” which becomes suppressed in the Indexicalization when preceding place names such as “Finnland.” And there is of course the inimitable assonance between the geographical “land” and past-participial segment “langt” to let safe asylum and arrival interlock through place and action. At the recursive vertical level, “Finnland” and “Flucht” alliterate to reinforce a similar import for the anticipated and attained destination. Live memory holds the construed elements together, permitting them to widen in further compounding. Through that capacity of retention, the chiastic reversal can take place between the compounds “Landsleuten”/“Finnland’ as underlined (in italics): the persons from one’s (“meinen”) own “land” become--quite literally--the ground for anxiety while that new land turns into a blessed haven. The positive import is extended to the “Freunde,” who were recently “Finnish foreigners” but became fast friends. The new intimacy surfaces through the further alliterative bond intertwining “Flucht”/“Finnland”/“Freunde.” These friends also belong to their line for all the reasons cited, no matter how much they open the next sentence in enjambement, as geographical space takes on a “human” qualifier through them. In their vertical alignment with the “Landsleuten,” who broke off the first line, the “Freunde” interlock as “people” and even share the “eu” Qualisign with them. Yet as “members” of their line, the benevolent friends also counter the nasty pursuers, not being merely “human” but truly “humane.”

Such recursive interaction could not be given this much attention in the other two structures, even when versified. For the horizontal level of the M-base, the second line radiates a gentleness in the soft nasal twang which weaves in and out of the Incons in their Sinsign composition, from the initiating “Bin” to the “nun nach Finnland gelangt. Freunde.”These Qualisigns exist in the first line, too, but not to that degree. So far, then, live memory has amalgamated “hostility” versus “hospitality,” with “old foe” pitted against “new friend” for the backgrounded lyric ego through all the Iconized foregrounding elucidated. Meaning evolves from meanings because every single element as “metaphor” contributes through its own denominational core what it has to offer in Qualisign material and deeper relevance for the poetic intext, the contextual correlate. Nominalization causes these micro-components to shift at every level; in their intensified “pointing at . . .” these components assume a direction-factor equal in strength to that of the noun, even if they are not overtly nouns.

In the third line,

Die ich gestern nicht kannte, stellten mir ein paar Betten

(That I didn’t know yesterday put a few beds for me)

the initiating relative pronoun “Die” still carries out the operative task of taking over from a noun antecedent, the “Freunde,” bearing “their” plurality. But as nominalized meaning, this pronoun underscores the numerous new friends “relayed” back to the “Freunde” by the reiterated plural. This number English cannot Iconize in any of the four relative-pronoun choices discussed, even if I had given the priority to the “human(e)” import rather than the casual tone by selecting instead either “who” or “whom.”

In both versions this line nevertheless begins with the relative pronoun clause, offset in German also at the other end by a comma. Within this clause, the lyric “I” as “ich” continues to be the subject and the friends as relative pronoun--which at the horizontal level precede it as they remain close to it--the grammatical object. The vertical reaffirmation of the lyric “I” deepens into a tone of renewed confidence and self-assertiveness, but also seems to underscore the singular status of the pronoun that contrasts with all the plural nouns of “persons” surrounding it, foe or friend. Yet this lyric “I” is brought closer to the friends in the clause which in horizontal sequence further “seals” this new friendship.

Next in the sequence is Iconic time, displayed by a deictic adverb and verb tense. The original has the adverbs “nun” and “gestern” directly under one another, an alignment the tense change unfortunately disrupts in English, as pointed out. Time in content, reduced to a tiny intextual circumference, becomes boosted by the structural time of Rhemic recursiveness as the vertically aligned adverbs come closer together while their signifance distinguishes present from past, from a “prior” moment of flight. The sheer sequence driving concretization forward becomes halted as the construal goes “back” or “up” to the preceding lines through the assimilative capacity of live memory. The past belongs to the native foes and the present to the new Finnish friends who, in the recent past of “yesterday,” were as yet unknown “foreigners,” if never outright foes matching the pursuers. That is how time Indexicalizes within the relative pronoun clause, replete with its verb, “kannte.”

The formerly “not-known” friends then erupt positively as subjects of the main clause, where they are found doing things “for” the lyric “I,” as is implicit in the dative “mir.” At this point the plurality tends away from people to things, first through the adjectival number “ein paar” which modifies the plural “Betten.” Ostensibly, the adjective resembles the English cognate, “a pair,” but together the Icons Indexicalize into “a few” as shown, hence a number which offers no set quantity and thus rests in that natural schematic ambiguity of material contents; their polyvalent direction-factor does not point at “two” or “four” to suggest either a (married) couple and family or a set number of acquaintances (as the native rather than new Finnish friends). What the number, however, does denote distinctly is the magnanimity of the friends. Their generosity is multiplied by attending not only to the one lyric “I” but “his” company. Through this import, the number and plural noun also endow the explicitly single lyric “I” with number; “he” did not come alone, or will not be lonely in exile. At that point, then, the number and Icons for things interact with the concerns of people.

The number in itself thus conveys positively the charitable nature of the friends and the implied companionship of the exile. There is visual and assonantal reverberation to heighten the significance of the welcome and repose the friends and beds exude, as shown by “gestern . . . kannte . . . stellten . . . Betten.” Vocalic “e” iteration is accompanied by the soft nasal twang of the “n” and the liquids “I” and “r” at the level of the nominalized wordsound at the M-base, once the meaning has been foregrounded in all its relevance. The geographical place of “Finnland” paved the way, in a manner of speaking, for the narrowed and yet more humanized, man-made interior, which is evoked in the fourth line,

In saubere Zimmer. . . .

(Into clean rooms. . . .)

Were this line not cut artificially by the excerpt, one might say that its brevity mirrored effectively the narrowing of space from a country to the four walls of the “rooms,” the German “Zimmer.” As pointed out before, the original Brecht text had “Im Lautsprecher” where the ellipsis points are. In yet another enjambement, this content spills over into the next line which resounds with the bragging radio messages of the enemy, called “scum” (Abschaum). So the nasty pursuers, the “Landsleute,” absorb the invective through live memory and share the alliteration with the “Lautsprecher” that carries their negative message. There are further geographical allusions to “Lappland” and a to hopeful “little door” that is still left open in the extreme North.

But to concentrate on this excerpt, its last line creates a type of implicit epiphora in vertical aligment with the preceding lines, two of which rendered “people” in the pursuers and friends, and the other two “things” in the beds and rooms. At the other horizontal end, the spontaneous activity of the friends is relayed through the accusative which English Iconizes as “Into.” The friends gain further in positive connotation since the plural rooms suggest something more lavish than many beds in one area, closer to a suite as noted. The cleanliness of these several rooms, which was stated to bear the onus of number in the plural ending of the adjective “saubere,” also becomes compounded, or magnified in size: every place is spotless. Although Iconic reinforcement is still part of the “clean” adjective, a fictional type of leitmotif in recurrence must be ruled out, letting Rhemic recursiveness instead underscore what is there. The same goes, of course, for this lyric “I” which remains suspended in its pronominal rendering; a genuine hero will not emerge--ever. Nor is this lyric “I” the poet Brecht. As poet instead of real speaker, Brecht is the inhering Referent of that constitutive consciousness which merges with the holistic lyric ego as authorial intent.

As for the Recipient, retention of live memory enabled the foregrounded M-base to meld into the poetic intext for the decoding consciousness. The whole context then hangs together through the meaning culled from these few meanings in their unique “metonymic” parts-to-whole relation. The full nominalization of structural metaphors has made that possible: whatever compatriots or Finland or beds, and so forth, designate elsewhere, here they came to interlock through an extended transference in order to lend their explicit and implicit meanings to a poet’s meaning in maximal connotative compounding. Every vestige contributed to that goal, even such seemingly “grammatical” particles as dative or accusative cases. For that reason I cautioned early in presenting Rhemic hierarchies that “words” as such are not to be taken too literally. Nominalization suffuses everything, and its Qualisigns are no longer the degenerate material that is left on a page. These signs bear a fully generate materialization that causes Icons to back in their idiosyncratic denomination what expanded Indexes gain in inner relevance. That was also the reason why my construal adhered mainly to the original here, always citing words in full inflection to stress that chosen constituents and not loose, latent vocables were involved. Although English matched few of these, the translated version was kept in tow for specific issues.

My analytic approach stayed diametrically opposed to that of the tradition: neo-Aristotelians use “metaphor” descriptively and I applied terms such as “noun,” “verb,” “adverb,” “preposition,” or “pronoun” descriptively. Metaphor, on the other hand, is for real, since ultimately all the components disclosed effectively their “formal features,” shedding Baumgärter’s “hybridic” state, once the esthetic ought was met by proper (second) stance of construal. Indeed, when the critic yields entirely to the connoissuer and moves from heuristic and retroactive readings to a hermeneutic concretization, Ingarden’s polyphony can go into affect among the interacting strata of the Rhemic construct, disclosing a transmuted rhythm which might be labeled “free verse” for its lack of set meter and/or neat rhyme schemes. Simultaneously, all the foregrounded sonorous and visual aspects of the M-base (I treated) come into their own.

To be sure, the content in the area of connotations may differ slightly, but not the basic procedure outlined for a superreader as Recipient. Construal needs full concentration on the given Icons, focusing only on what is actually there, put there by the authorial will which may then be culled successfully from the constituents--without any proxy-tenet substitution of guessing what analogy prompts a superficial anomaly in replacement. What Brecht meant, his meanings disclosed in their circumference and deeper content; his intent was derived from their contextualization at depth, going “up” to the (mute) sonorous and visual idiosyncrasies that hover at the surface. That is the procedure, there were no existents to “prove” the veracity of any occurrence in time and space; there were no fictional “emergents” that solidify into persons with set traits; there were only “expressants” that kept an Iconic lyric “I” afloat and yet forged coherence at every level, horizontally in foregrounded sequence and vertically in backgrounded recursiveness. Since the esthetic ought is intrinsically spontaneous by challenging a Recipient, a reader who relinquishes the “super “prefix could approach the text as elucidated, under the other two structures. With Dicent the Recipient quite literally would not get far, but with Argument the semantic depletion of adequation would cause all rich nuances to evaporate.

Brecht as person is thus not at issue, despite biographical overtones. Had this not been an excerpt, the title, which was said to read “1940,” certainly would have played a part in the recursive significance that belongs to the structural time of Rhemic immanence. In the process, the date would have been combined at the implicit interpretive level with the Iconic time the text displayed. But a real date it is not. To be sure, the background and/or biographical circumstances should not be ignored in full literary scholarship, yet they cannot compensate for the actualized I-M-O generation which has Recipient communicate with Referent. That goes even for a type of Whitmanesque Song of Myself Brecht had forged (1963, pp. 148 151; Esslin, 1962, pp. 177 178). The poem’s very title, “Of Poor B.B.,” cites its poet’s initials while its text commences with “I, Bertolt Brecht, . . .” More for didactic purposes of spreading his socialism than in sheer affirmation of a Rhemic M-base did Brecht insist on a “faithful word for-word reproduction of the German,” as one of his translators, Bentley, put it in an “Introduction” to one of the plays (1978, p. 10). Yet even Bentley saw fit to disobey the author by offering a more “nonliteral” translation in the end (ibid., p. 11).

My bilingual analysis has tried to uphold such fidelity in reproducing a text, as Bentley has it, without literalizing the Icons for the sole purpose of foregrounding the M-base when that practice threatened to distort the backgrounded Indexicalization and thus the significance of the lyric ego. Making the decision was not always easy. Still, the analysis proved that, with proper authentication of poetic intent, Baumgärtner’s “hybrid” is unmasked as bogus: all “formal features” of the poem appeared. The next analysis should have been a straightforward case since the text includes those features unmistakably. But even such overt backing from the language apparently does not prevent a critic from forcing a literary construct into the strait jacket of compliance with logic, making the text seem “prosaic” by forsaking the decidedly “poetic” Icons the author offered.

Analysis: Levin on Nonrecoverable Compression in Dickinson

The second analysis is based on a text with decidedly “poetic” traits. Unfortunately even that kind of textual control does not prevent a critic essentially from turning the construct into yet another hybrid by neglecting the esthetic ought and taking recourse in logic rather than language. The critic is S. R. Levin and the example a poem by Emily Dickinson. Levin cited it in his essay entitled “The Analysis of Compression in Poetry” (1971). Compression should be a fitting qualifier for the type of condensation characterizing Rhemic coherence. Unfortunately, Levin bases compression on the traditional notion that linguistic reference actually represents the empirical world in matching classes of epistemological or so-called encyclopedic knowledge. Levin fails to realize, therefore, that language presents only itself through concepts derived from signitive acts which guide linguistic competence in further use of such acts. This failure leads him tacitly into espousing the ontological category-mistake as he seeks to explain linguistic meaning through logical mediation.

Levin’s idea of compression is thus not a matter of centripetal denseness but one of deletion in a “reduction” of logical connectives he sees fit to fill in through a process of semantic recovery, even as he claims that poetic language should be “nonrecoverable.” It appears, therefore, that Levin can find no other method of dealing with construal of literary language. His general procedure becomes equivalent to taking a photographic transparency of some subject matter a painting contains and placing this over the canvas in order to fill in what the artist has left out. Whether or not the omissions actually are painted in, they are to be pointed out by him. His vantage point of naive realism is not unlike trying to extract chlorophyll from a painted leaf. Such skepticism assumes that the purposive medium under scrutiny cannot be evaluated on its own ground.

In language, which as purposive domain resembles art even before it is literary, that ground is the linguistic Qualisign, the base of all perception from which arise the validated contents, the Legisigns that erupt into the explicit Icons. Any attempt to by-pass that ground induces the paraphrase, which Levin readily endorses. When attacked by Kintgen for this parasitic approach to meaning, Levin staunchly defends the paraphrase: in his “Reply to Kintgen” (1972, pp. 109-110), Levin insists it helps avert “random generation” in language. His rebuttal demonstrates that typical neo-Aristotelian perspective which non-Aristotelian semantics has tried to eradicate from language theory. Since all “generation” of language is willed, there is no such thing as random chance. What Levin confuses is the volitional autotelism of a purposive state with a volatile contingency whose aleatory outcome resembles the tossing of dice. From the intrinsic vantage point, Legisign validation creates norms. Ordained to serve speaker competence, these norms become absolute, much as they seem “arbitrary” from any other standpoint.

By coincidence, I made that very point in the same journal a couple of years after Levin’s “Analysis” appeared. My article (Gumpel, 1974) treated the “essence” of a “reality” that evolves as a “construct of language.” Such a sphere can be traced back no further than to the signitive convolutions speakers share intersubjectively as interlocutory partners within their speech community. Only acts of meaning through authorial intent have indented signitive consciousness, and every content serving these acts acquired its explicit and implicit denominations through composing a constitutional unit(y) that engenders the new completion of language. No single speaking “subject” can alter a language without conflicting with the intersubjective consent Legisgns embody, nor interfere with a choice based on those signs that a given speaker has already made.

The paraphrase, then, is one attempt to meddle with an authorial will in a particular constitution. My previous bilingual presentation forced me partially into such a role as translator, and so did the need to express my construal of implicit meaning which, as analytic critic, I had to pass on to my own readers. In that capacity, I intervened artificially by Iconizing Indexes in a type of explicit “recovery” process to specify what the meanings “meant” for the reader of my study. Yet I remained ever conscious of the “mediating” role that interposed me between the original Referent and its Recipient. At the same time, my fundamental method proceded unhindered by “recovering” only from the Icons offered by a text. This focus is the sole recourse to reconstructing and reconstituting the Referent in conjunction with the textual control the structure exerts and an alert superreader recognizes (or “re-cognizes”) under the conditions specified. Whatever my inevitable encroachment on the original encoding of the authorial will as translator and/or critic, I decoded the text methodically from its Iconic base and simultaneously encoded its significance in my analysis of it. Since my readers got the text, (bilingually) reiterated for every structure, they certainly could engage in their own construal as well as following my theory.

Nothing was lost, therefore, concerning the intimacy between Referent and Recipient in an interlocutory partnership. By comparison, Levin’s recovery becomes literally “unauthorized” by not focusing on the Icons of a text but on norms that anticipate a compliance with logic. Consequently, instead of “receiving” what the nonrecoverable poem actually owns in contents, Levin is constantly “reasoning” with it. Endemic in his approach is the deviance cult which compensates for selectional violation by the means of proxy-tenet substitution, here the recovery. That issue is hardly irrelevant to Levin since he subsequently devoted a work to the Semantics of Metaphor (1977). I cite the title because, much as the work offers some insight into current linguistic theories on metaphor, its allusion to “semantics” remains a misnomer for the reasons noted.

The underlying problems, therefore, are rooted in the outlook, not of literary language but language itself as bearer of meaning. That becomes clear with Levin’s brief excursus into daily discourse before embarking on his analysis of poetic compression. He may be right in saying that in everyday use “reductions” of content are often not sensed as compression (1971, pp. 41-42). But he does not offer a satisfactory explanation for the reasons. One reason pertains to semantic rendundance in that normalizing power language possesses, which is exactly why it becomes foolish to reify lexical deviance by logical means. As my study has shown, constant usage in set situational contexts with the aid of adequation flattens the most outlandish behabitive or idiom, from an asyntactic “How do you do?” to a seemingly meaningless “red herring” speakers wield confidently. Also, in a particular ostensive setting, the objective referent as reality-nexus provides sufficient backing for the expression, as was shown previously with my orthographic and graphic ‘doppelganger’ for Ingarden’s “pen” sentence, including some of the more detrimental side effects of the processing involved in adequation.

Since Levin offers examples (leaning heavily on the linguistics of Katz and Postal), my points may be illustrated once more: imperative and intransitive uses are “reduced” by missing a grammatical subject and object, respectively. Imperatives call to action and thus the verb as predicate for once takes priority over the subject, which is confined anyway to a second-person address, a set “you,” and for that reason warrants suppression more readily, or so semantic redundance has ordained. A strong exhortation may then “recover” the subject, as in, “You do (this or that)!” However, the moment that happens, another correlate has been created, a different constitutional unit(y). So “recovery” of one and the same “reference” in a transaction with transference is not involved and remains impossible. Strictly speaking, therefore, there is no “compression,” and no “reduction” or “addition” either. Instead, two commands arise; one bears an implicit subject at 0 and the other an explicit subject at M in thetic I-M-0 generation. In one command “you” must be released as relevant Index of a verb Icon and in the other “You” is the initiating Icon, posessing its own denotative core with an illocutionary type of urgency.

There is no getting around those conditions; every copyright law protects the explicit base, as stated before. The same rule applies to the presence or absence of a grammatical object in an intransitive or transitive use. Levin’s example, “John is reading,” is a complete sentence, a constitutive unit(y) bearing the teleology of its contextualization through an authorial will. Should some grammatical object such as “a book” be added, a new syntactic unit(y) will have to be generated, with a signitive act differently corporealized and embodied in shifts of natural (structural) transference. The two sentences are no more related than paintings within their own frames, irrespective of their matching themes. Either one artifact is willed or the other, unless one wants to “repaint” the canvas by emulating the original artist. In language, too, only the author makes the choice and accordingly becomes embedded as the Referent that a Recipient may cull from the explicit and implicit contents.

At the level of syntagma in some extended (concatenating) context, the two sentences may follow one another, but they cannot be superimposed upon one another. Again, only adequation effects a type of juxtaposition where a reality-nexus may help out: John still reads but the sentence is backed by a situational context where said person holds a book. Then the objective referent backs the amalgamated pure referent after it has been projected “out into” the extralinguistic reality. But at the level of the pure referent, implicit relevance and logical or factual recovery are inimical: one must be deriued from the given explicit contents while the other obtrudes on meaning from the outside. All these conditions need to be examined and kept in their proper perspective; they have no bearing on non-adequated, literary use, anyway, but explain only under what circumstances the type of paraphrasing Levin advocates becomes at all plausible. No pure “phrasing,” however, can ever be replaced by a “parallel phrasing” without lapsing into a “pseudo-phrase” that destroys the authorial will as inchoate Referent.

It is doubtful that a critic who has not come to terms with these issues is likely to succeed with an analysis of poetic compresssion as genuine semantic idiosyncrasy. Levin’s particular recovery method is to be demonstrated with one of the texts by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) that he offers, “When Etna basks and purrs,” as the opening line of this untitled poem reads. What seems startling right away is that Levin, the linguist, pays so little attention to the language that he uses a bowdlerized version of the poem. Such a lack of authentication becomes in itself a type of “recovery” right there! Also, as with Baumgärtner, no background is offered for the poem. In Baumgärtner’s case this limitation seemed more acceptable since he settled openly for an excerpt to prove the language looked ordinary. Yet Levin wants to explain how “poetic” the “compression” is in this text without honoring the poetic Referent as compositional medium. It looks as though he settled for the first version he came across, in total ignorance of the controversies revolving around the unwarranted emendations of Dickinson’s poetry.

Clearly, in all this shortsightedness Levin displays the very “anachronism” Jakobson invoked as he castigated linguists who are impervious to vital matters of literature. Such an anachronism assumes double meaning. Not only did Levin, in Jakobson’s sense, neglect the most rudimentary aspects of literary scholarship. Levin also became literally out of step with the times by accepting misconceived emendations that were based on dogmatic ideas of literary etiquettes from an earlier era and had long been rectified by the T. H. Johnson editions of the 1950s. The authenticated versions are now readily available, either in the voluminous variorum edition (1955), or in the single volume of “Complete” (1960) poems (republished in paperback in 1975). Just a modicum of research would have produced that much information. The fact that Levin still has not seen the light, unfortunately, can be observed in a recent essay on “Literary Metaphor” (1979, pp. 131 132), which draws on yet another bowdlerized Dickinson poem.

Let me do the honors once again, then, by filling in the most basic background any literary work of art requires. As revealed in the variorum edition (1955, p. 803) and the compact single volume (1960/1975, p. 513), the “Etna” poem, number 1146, was actually written in 1869 but not published until 1914. Such an epochal gap between the original inception and its postponed official recording is rather typical for this diffident woman poet, whose recognition had to await the twentieth century, a situation that in part was to blame for the patronizing emendations of her early (male) editors. To compensate for Levin’s neglect of the poet in favor of her dogmatic editors, this study is forced to entertain yet another type of “bilingual” version, not in aid of a translation but an artificially created epochal gap. The authentic version at the time of inception, so vital to the M-base, appears first, as it was taken from the Johnson edition, while Levin’s corrupt version (1971, p. 42) of a later reception follows.

When Etna basks and purrs

Naples is more afraid

Than when she shows her Garnet Tooth —

Security is loud —

When Etna basks and purrs,

Naples is more afraid

Than when she shows her Garnet Tooth;

Security is loud.

According to the Johnson variorum edition (1955, pp. lxvi, 803), the first authentic version came from a manuscript written in pencil around 1869 (presently at the Houghton Library of Harvard). Even the first publication of this poem in the anthology The Single Hound (1914), edited by the poet’s niece Martha Dickinson Bianchi, honored textual fidelity. Yet these many years later the reception by a linguist goes awry because greater comfort is taken in the standard punctuation the editors have foisted upon the text in obliteration of the dashes so eminently characteristic of this poet. In the original, the dashes reinforce a poetic type of anacoluthon as will be seen. But some of that characteristic can be gleaned right here since any “syntactic” coherence becomes markedly suspended by the dashes in the original and artificially preserved by the emendations in the bowdlerized version. Fortunately, even the bowdlerized version left intact another Dickinson trait, the deliberate capitalization, which becomes carefully planned to create a unique correspondence with constituents that are thus marked automatically through the onset of lines or by denoting place names.

Surprisingly, even her discerning editor, T. H. Johnson (1960/1975, p. xi), sees fit to describe Dickinson’s capitalization as “capricious,” suggesting that nothing but whimsical poetic license accounted for it. The issue of capitalization, in fact, would produce some curious reversals if offered in yet another bilingual version that included a translation into German this time. As was stated when analyzing the Brecht poem, capitalization of nouns is mandatory in German, and thus any poetic whim of an Anglo-Saxon poet on that score would evaporate with that syntactic rule. Going the opposite way, to uphold poetic self-assertion by keeping the nouns earmarked for lower case would only destroy the foregrounded M-base. Indeed, to stress that kind of independence the German poet George--already cited for rendering the dark black flower composed only of print and meaning--went the opposite way. As pointed out at the time, he did not capitalize nouns, a practice quite common nowadays among avant-garde German poets (see Gumpel, 1976, pp. 90-118). Here the problem would be reversed in an English translation by obliterating authorial intent.

These difficulties concerning translations cannot be overlooked even if none is added to this analysis. In the case of Dickinson, it is just possible that an epochal time factor may be involved as well. Her capitalization may not be so capricious or unique if one attempts to study the literary etiquettes of the time of inception. Some capitalization was more common in Dickinson’s day. At least, that is the impression one gets from citations of Dickinson forebears, all the way back to Colonial days, which appeared in a study on The Poetry of American Women from 1632 to 1945 by Watts (1977, pp. 23-27).

Levin pays little attention to these Iconic idiosyncrasies anyway, for which reason I keep stressing them. His approach to this text may be divided as follows: (1) the comparison, (2) the collocations, (3) the additions, and (4) the tree diagrams. Because the poem bears a comparison with the “more”/“Than” of lines two and three, Levin tries to restore the lacking “symmetry” of poetic compression by introducing an unrelated logical comparison of four fixed terms (1971, pp. 42-43). This very idea stays so true to traditional semantics that it falls right in with the proportional metaphor, where Aristotle (1960, Loeb ed., pp. 80-81), in a typical ontological category-mistake, claims that proportion within a logical correspondence of four terms comprising an analogy permits their juggling to keep any lexical anomaly comprehensible.

Levin’s contextless collocations may seem more “modern” in the development of linguistics, but by that contemporaneousness insinuate how “far” theories treating language as bearer of meaning have come. Instead of staying with the text, Levin strays from it by offering a series of concocted strings generative grammarians like to present. Rendered in everyday lingo and not even remotely connected with the content of the text to be analyzed--something about a “Jon” and his “wife” (pp. 42-43)--the collocations are simply too ridiculous to detail further. The space nevertheless devoted to them seems out of all proportion to the the amount provided for direct analysis of the poem itself.

More interesting are the additions because at least they involve the text, which is their main saving grace, unfortunately. What makes this practice questionable from the start is that to nonrecoverable poetry one is not supposed to “add” recovered parts. So Levin gets busy dabbling in his own type of editorial amendment of the text, as italicised in the following citations, “. . . shows her Garnet Tooth and roars,”“Security is loud, not soft (or ‘quiet’) ”(p. 44). In support of his curious reasoning for an esthetic deployment that hardly permits such a measure, Levin introduces the criteria of “approbation” and “opprobium.” That is, he speaks of having to “justify” his addition of “roars” because “loud” (otherwise) “implicitly confers disapproval on ‘purrs”‘ (ibid., p. 44). The suggestion is that a loud purring is a roar, and thus he restores this missing connection--in more than one sense, I might add. He is not only concerned about the disrupted meaning but the five senses of perception which, among others, involve sound and sight, as is made evident in his second addition, the parenthetical “quiet.” It is almost as if Levin has never heard of synaesthesia, although I shall demonstrate shortly that he must have done so to be competent enough in English to wield “loud” at all.

Expansively, Levin adds that no one should be concerned with the reason why this poet “thought there was security in loudness”(ibid.). It is nice of him to rule out Wimsatt and Beardsley’s intentional fallacy. But the comment is also wholly gratuitous: an author’s “thought” is not at issue unless made explicit in imagery (M) and implicit in relevant connotations (0), at which point the Referent (I) obtains as the Interpretant or authorial will that selected what the contents carry. Anything else in the way of private motives, personal feelings and the like stays literally “immaterial” and thus “use-less” to the poem, hence also to its Recipient.

The irony is that Levin’s normative stance, aimed at justifying his logical “judgment,” entangles him further in illogical conclusions, because a literary work of art cannot tolerate such an approach. His next addition tells him apparently that the volcano, or Etna in this poem, stands metaphorically for “a lion” (p. 47). Cats purr and lions roar, would be the logic, although he himself and not the poet contributed this roar through the reasoning elucidated. The “random generations” against which his logical recovery was to guard thus abound through such arbitrary additions, and they certainly seem “aleatory” in relation to the poetic context.

Where the rationality of Etna’s lionization then falls apart is in Levin’s dissection of Etna in supposedly semantic markers which are really logical, or epistemological classes termed “+Animate,” “—Masculine,” and “+Feline” (ibid.). These categories, even in their explicit form, are typical of markers and distinguishers linguists (Katz and Fodor) employed in attempts at a rational semantic “disambiguation” of meaning, an approach I discuss in the article mentioned at the outset (Gumpel, 1974, pp. 180-185). But the obvious question arising here is why Etna needs to be given an oblique “non-Masculine” (—) marker when the third line has her decidedly (+) “Feminine” in the pronoun and possessive “she” and “her,” whether or not Levin likes that gender. Here he almost seems to subtract from the language what rightfully belongs to it while adding what it does not own. Put another way, the text blatantly “approves” the feminine gender while Levin’s logic disapproves of it.

In the way of an explanation, there is once again a curious neo-Aristotelian root which will emerge in the adjunct but is pertinent here: Aristotle exemplifies the simile in a comparison with metaphor (Rhetoric, 1959, Loeb ed., pp. 366-367) by “lionizing” Achilles, that bravest of masculine heroes. His followers, from Quintilian on, have emulated Aristotle, never letting go of the lionized human male in their analyses of metaphor, particularly the animation which one of Levin’s markers bears also. The leonine connection with humans is thus traditionally masculine and Levin, well imbued with convention, apparently cannot bring himself to equate “a lion” outright with a female. Then why go to all the trouble of foisting the lion on poor, feminine Etna? It is the ontological category-mistake that causes Levin to confuse logical with linguistic categories. In the process he converts feminine Etna into a leonine creature of his own making through a (lexical) “transference” which goes from the inanimate topological phenomenon to the feline that, in his stubborn insistence, also assumes a “non-Male” qualifier! Anomaly is bridged by the analogy of a roaring noise that exists only in the ear of this beholder. Levin’s straining for logic has somehow caught him in a logical hiatus. Why, if at all, not make Etna leonine by describing her as “lioness” to match her authenticated, poetic sex?

Levin’s last critical offerings to be discussed, the tree diagrams (pp. 45-46), certainly keep him in the transformationalist fold of the twentieth century. These diagrams are consistent only in making conspicuous his own anachronism of not being conversant with the purpose of literary language, since they typically shift the word order around to suit standard language. Thus little can be done with these unwarranted blueprints for a language the poem does not own.

To rectify some of Levin’s suppositions, let me briefly examine the Icon “loud” that led to the “roar” and the non-Masculine “lion.” Had Levin probed his native competence as this poet did instead of plying logic, he would soon have realized that English has already provided natural synaesthesia for “loud.” Surely he is aware that the word may designate garish color schemes. So the explicit reference may be to sound but the implicit periphery has been indented to cover for sight as well--which fits right in with the showy dentine image of the preceding line. Indeed, “loud” is a good example for demonstrating what Ingarden meant by the dynamics of heteronomous, pure-intentional “reference,” whose indigenous semantic pointer, the direction-factor, owns everything the material and formal contents offer. All Dickinson had to do was to follow up on that very “directive” and endow it with new relevance for the transference intrinsic to this poem.

Next, Levin’s non-Masculine “lion”: why not adhere to the “cat” the poem “approves” through the purring? The poem also justifies that construal by depicting a stealthy surreptitious “Etna”; a roar would give it away. Again, English native competence has provided the potential “feline” and “female” associations that meet in the Icon “cat.” In one of those animated types of “personality metaphors” discussed before, an envious, underhand female is referred to as a “cat” or being “catty,” something the indigenous pointer, the direction-factor of the English word, encompasses naturally. The diachronic transparencies for this feline-female linkage may be there or absent, fair or unfair. What matters is that these synchronic states have solidified. Dickinson certainly plays on those intrinsic connotations as she displays supreme awareness of that “Mother” tongue; one wishes her theoretician here would demonstrate a similar cognizance. As a translator, I certainly would have experienced difficulties of integrating these contents with the intextual whole, just because they reside in a specific language and not in universal logic. Although German “laut” seems almost a perfect Sinsign match for English, its indentations do not permit the synaesthesia elucidated. Neither does the feline “Katze,” despite its feminine gender.

In addition, Dickinson’s femininization of “Etna” gets some help from its Qualisign closeness to the proper name for a female, “Edna.” Whatever the case, Dickinson knew what she was doing as Referent of this poem by palpating, in a manner of speaking, every oppositional value of (hyletic) form and (noematic) content of the meanings at her disposal, which cannot be said of Levin as a Recipient. In his preoccupation with logical recovery and dissection, Levin never really made it his business to “receive” the poem in its Iconic base. By converting meaning into semantic marbles for logic, all his collocations and additions only proved literally “use-less”--like the overgrown “weeds” that were the topic of some of my earlier “epochal” investigations.

Let me now indicate what causes poetic “compression” in this poem, in a line-by line analysis of the authenticated version, although not without reinvoking some of Levin’s points where relevant. At the end, the entire text is recapitulated in order to get a better glimpse of the hermeneutic and polyphonous interaction among the lines and the inherent Rhemic strata. The procedure thus follows basically my former approach to the Rheme. Not some dubious lexical “lion” but every Rhemic particle is “metaphor” and/or nominalized meaning. With that reminder, I introduce the first line:

When Etna basks and purrs

Iconic time leads this line, capable of creating only a “temporal” association within this context, specifically poetic intext. The “When” bears the Index “whenever” and thus the qualifier of potentiality that when Etna engages in certain actions something happens, and not necessarily that they occur there and now. As subordinating conjunction, “When” also initiates the dependent clause which has “Etna” as its noun-subject. Any educated superreader recognizes the narrow Indexicalization typical of geographical place names. But an informed superreader knows also that the Icon as image encapsulated in this text is just that, as remote from any real place as Brecht’s “Fin(n)land” turned out to be when composing the Rheme and not Argument.

In further syntagmatic extension “Etna” soon erupts in the activities that endow her with her feminine-feline nature. The recursive direction-factors of the finite verbs “basks”/“purrs,” linked by the conjunction “and,” interlock with “Etna” in nominal-verbal unfolding of this clause, completing the first line. Also, I exteriorized “feminine” before “feline” as relevant Index for the verb “basks” since this may signify humans more readily than “purrs,” thus in anticipation of the later Icons registering Etna’s sex that a retroactive reading would substantiate. In any case, the action borne by the first verb conveys languor. The second verb, with its foregrounded onomatopoeia through the doubled Qualisign liquids in “rr,” adds contentment as it imitates that real feline sound, droning on. “Etna” has become Indexicalized as a seemingly innocuous domestic pet, the “cat.”

If one wants to be pedantic, the verb “basks” approximates a violation equivalent to Chomsky’s type of subcategorization rule. For this intransitive verb usually precedes a prepositional phrase, such as “in the sun,” perhaps. Although this import may be contained in “basks,” it cannot be recovered to make the language more logical. What “basks” nevertheless releases effectively is the Index of inertia. It imparts the prone posture; Etna appears flat, almost crouching in a submissive gesture. However, that comparative calm is shaken by the second line:

Naples is more afraid

The new geographical place name takes over as subject in the main clause. Live memory intertwines the two geographical Icons into an inimitable as well as intimate “poetic anagram,” as it may well be called. In a vertical recursive Sinsign correspondence, “Etna” and “Naples” enter into their own chiastic reversal, which is in some respects not unlike the “Landsleute” and “Finnland” of Brecht’s text. These two Icons become indissolubly and yet also contrastively linked since the calm of one arouses the fear in the other. That import is boosted by their sonorous and visual Qualisign dispositions, which are the “ground” at the Rhemic M-base to be considered, and not the topology of the real places that might end up being signified in adequation. The state or action of the one causes the emotional reaction in the other, as the predicate “is more afraid” elicits at the level of the horizontal sequence. Thus, the Iconic geographical intertwining when further backgrounded is unmasked as a dissonant relation since gentle “Etna” instills greater fear in “Naples,” as underscored by the numeric qualifier of the first segment “more” comprising the comparative.

Not only “Etna” but “Naples” deserves Levin’s “+Animate” marker through the predicate that interlocks with this subject in the denotation of fear. However, even this example causes me only to reiterate my point of linguistic competence on which the poet draws so cleverly. It is quite common for geographical place names to become anthropomorphized and pluralized at depth, operating as type of collective nouns that cover for many inhabitants. Thus one says “Washington,” meaning all the politicians residing there, for example. Of course, “Naples” may not be quite as famous (or firmly indented) to evoke that swiftly a similar implication. But in this context with the predicate extension elucidated, Naples is not only animated but anthropomorphized. Indeed, in its sharp Iconic singular number, “Naples” becomes a type of metonym or synecdoche, conveying “one” though meaning “many” inhabitants. Of course, one can look to a selectional deviance here in terms of personification--as Chomsky was shown to do with his “Misery loves company.” The function of Naples parallels that usage as a singular noun working through a “collective” group of people.

If, however, language as ontic heteronomy is capable in a language of violating selectionality in the most common expressions, such discoveries help mainly the construal, not the semantic substance based on functioning. From a descriptive standpoint, it is interesting to note that while the imagery of the Brecht poem traded more on plurals, this one reinforces outwardly the singular. In the former poem, “people” in meaning stayed devoid of gender because the plural was prevalent; here geographical place names such as “Etna” that could be rendered in an asexual third person become feminine.

Upon a further discovery, ontic heteronomy and ontic autonomy become curiously pitted against one another, and this issue also involves Levin’s study on the semantics of metaphor (1977, pp. 95-99), where he struggled with the “problem” of “encyclopedic knowledge,” which he could not address conclusively. That is to be expected for someone unclear on the bounds separating logic from language. Thus, let me attempt that resolution right here. A Recipient well versed in geography is most likely aware of the fact that the real volcano called Etna is located on the East coast of Sicily, whereas Naples remains closer to Mount Vesuvius. While the place names in the poem suffice for their geographical landmark as such, they might be considered to approximate misnomers if thus regionally displaced. However-and this is the important point-for this poem, their “placement” in the text gets priority, relevant to that intextual poetic anagram construed recursively, in the precise positioning on each line. The priority of these non-adequated Icons is to foreground a lyric ego instead of signifying a land of actual existence. Any cognition in my Picture of Language was seen to follow from the perception of the linguistic form which yields the Legisign that in turn erupts into the Icon, which in this instance foregrounds the poem through these particular names, “Etna” and “Naples.”

So even if Dickinson has made a mistake, she is not the author of a National Geographic article, conveying facts about the volcano and the town in “truth” claims that, at the level of the objective referent, identify such a statement as false. The poem instead remains “true” when it consists of validated Legisigns and carries out its function for the structure in which it comes. Thus any encyclopedic knowledge about the erroneous geography recedes behind the semantic task at hand, since the “cognition” here goes into the constitution of a poem depending mainly on the performances of encoding and decoding. In other words, the poem makes sense and permits construal without relaying accurate information about the empirical world. That is not to say the error could not be noted in a text-critical apparatus, but certainly not in editorial emendations that destroy the poetic anagram of this tiny poetic inscape, to borrow a term from G. M. Hopkins (in Frye, 1967, p. 121).

Surprisingly, encyclopedic knowledge also becomes contingent on philology here. For any literate Recipient knows that Dickinson’s place names “Etna” and “Naples” are standardized Anglicized versions of Greek “Aetna” and Italian “Napoli.” If the language belonged to said magazine in adequated use, the original Greek and Italian terms might be preferred and paraphrased accordingly, in aid of any geographical, etymological and/or mythological information. However, to a poem like this which depends on direct Iconization of meaning by meanings, any paraphrase is anathema. While “Aetna” may sound more “erudite” than “Etna” to those keenly aware of a Classical past, no such choice of alternative exists for the inherent Referent of this text. The poetic anagram and related associations construed so far would disintegrate, a deleterious effect that could only worsen with the important foregrounding revealed in the third line,

Than when she shows her Garnet Tooth —

First in order is the second comparative segment and, at the other end of the line, the first punctuation mark of the authenticated version. This dash, incidentally, should explain also why I have refrained from adding any of my own punctuation to integrate the end of each line with the syntax in my continuing sentence. That is something handbooks on manuscript style apparently have not solved as yet, at their level of lacking awareness of where “encyclopedic knowledge” stops, since they always insist on punctuation inside of quotation marks. In a case like this, such a practice would only amount to yet another type of bowdlerization. Also, I have spoken of “syntactic” elements such as “clauses,” although this unconventional punctuation shatters that idea. Still, since all these terms apply descriptively to these structural metaphors, as was pointed out with the very first analysis, such a nomenclature presents no problem.

This third line appears longest, as, by coincidence, was Brecht’s in the previous analysis. Ostensibly “logical,” the comparative segment “Than” in onset capitalization counterbalances its comparative predecessor, the “more” of the preceding line that first led into the comparison. Simultaneously, the reiterated Iconic time “when” which initiated the poem now succeeds the comparison. Horizontal sequence, therefore, has pushed Iconic time over, as it were, by opening with the comparison; at the vertical, recursive level, the link is thus diagonal rather than anaphoral. Still, the pleonasm of Iconic time itself cannot be missed, since the “When”/“when” of the respective lines shows Etna in reverse. Still pivotal to Naples and the comparison, subdued Etna is “more” dangerous “Than” flashy Etna.

“Etna,” of course, is not there as Icon, only as “pro-noun” and possessive in the definitive feminine “she” and “her,” identifications Levin tried to elude in his indirect non-Masculine marker. Etna’s pronominalization in these operative alternatives may be a subtle way of announcing her more harmless state. Certainly, this change permits the alliteration of “she shows.” More likely, too, these modest operative signs in lower case allow for projecting the final image caught in the “Garnet Tooth”; it juts out all the more, willfully capitalized as it is. What about this curious dentine object? Grammatically, this fang is easily identified in that it differs as the only direct object of a verb, “shows,” amid all the intransitive verbs and predicate adjectives. Why is it there or, put another way, what does it mean in relation to the whole?

For an alert superreader the significance of this object is not hard to isolate. Momentarily, I break with the sequence as analytic critic and begin with the dentine: the “Tooth” itself ties in with the emphasis on the singular in this context. As one of the traditional parts of speech, this “Tooth” amounts to a “count noun,” a qualifier relevant to number here. For, certainly, from a logical standpoint most mouths commonly possess more than one such fang, at least a bilateral match. What the singular accomplishes better than an amorphous plural is this “metonymic” or “synecdochal” affirmation of the one for the many. In that manner, the singular reinforces at its numeric level the stark verticality of the Qualisign dimensions bearing the capitalized “T”: this fang is not to be overlooked. As the object of the Iconic showing its verb contained, this “Tooth” becomes “showy” to the point of ostentation. Indeed, this prominent “Tooth” with its pronounced Qualisign disposition becomes a type of poetic “hieroglyph” or “ideogram”: it conveys the outer, histrionic fierceness of Etna baring her one-and-only fang in what seems like a menacing stance that turns out to be relatively harmless.

Etna, of course, is not neglected either in Iconization by the other side of this fang, its modifier, “Garnet.” First, the Icon of this attributive embraces both the geographical place names in an extended poetic anagram that works recursively with the aid of live memory, as shown italicised in “Etna”/“Naplesp”/“Garnef.” This is poetic compression, indeed, but intensified through the repertoire the text offers. In this Iconic pleonasm, “Naples” gets caught in the middle, as it does at the deeper backgrounded level, since its fate hinges on fearing “Etna” when there as Icon but not showing off her “Garnet Tooth.” The foregrounding, indeed, exudes a symmetrical and yet reversed type of “syllabic palindrome,” with the last syllable in “Etna” reinforced as first syllable in “Naples,” while the first syllable in “Etna” ends up as the last syllable in “Garnet.” Dickinson’s intuitive genius of probing oppositional values in her native language seems complete. “Space” moves together in closer recursive coherence, whether or not the real volcano is elsewhere.

Dickinson almost unwittingly becomes “didactic” here in “teaching” Recipients of language how geographic place names may work as semantic entities when they reside within the oppositional system of one language. This point was first made, of course, with the “beak” emitting those onomatopoetic rooster cries. Even if the onomatopoeia there or the geographical label here had produced the same words, they lie differently within the semasiological system of one language. That goes especially for the relations “Garnet” is capable of forming with these (Anglicized) place names. The noun “Garnet,” as opposed to the “Tooth,” is not a count noun but may be classed conventionally with “mass” nouns. This Icon in its attributive role thus provides the suggestion of “substance” for this fang. Since “garnet” signifies a stone consisting of a mineral in a reddish hue, this import affirms the “composition” of this “Tooth” in its hardness. There exists for this “Garnet” dentine also a similar metalinguistic contiguity that was discussed with “Etna” and “Edna.” This time it is “Garnet” and “granite,” which affirm additionally the hardness of this “Tooth.” With the chromatic implication noted, the Index of molten rock becomes released, glowing red lava. The implied buccal cavity through the dentine image may evoke “mouth” for the rim of a crater.

At this point, then, the meaning evolves that when Etna spews fire for all to see “she” is safer than when she is “smoldering” in faint rumbles that keep her relatively motionless. Etna is deviously tame and fierce, to be feared when quiet and not feared when fiery. Nor can a certain gory implication be ignored with this predatory “red” fang, if “blood” outright may go too far. In this manner, then, the carnivorous, dentine image and the active volcano interlock through connotative compounding, made possible through live memory that retains the construed elements. To be sure, the “encyclopedic” knowledge that lava is red, as is the mineral, seems to hover in the background. Also, not every literate and competent native speaker comes armed with the type of lapidary information needed for “Garnet,” which, in fact, I gathered from a dictionary. But nothing can detract from the evidence of the contents; they count because they are there in all their idiosyncratic disposition; they expand inwardly as outwardly “Naples” becomes intertwined with both sides of “Etna.”

Indeed the coherence of this tiny poetic intext is such that part of my construal actually kept anticipating the last line, which is to be entered with the entire text:

When Etna basks and purrs

Naples is more afraid

Than when she shows her Garnet Tooth —

Security is loud —

Outwardly, to be sure, the fourth line enters abruptly, a type of anacoluthon in disrupted thought, reinforced outwardly by the two dashes that keep it apart from the rest of the text. That is to say, the two dashes as nominalized punctuation marks contribute their significance to this poem. They cast the last line as a type of poetic “islet,” ringed off and kept suspended by not coming to a close through a period. So these elements, too, are nominalized to exude “meaning” that is relevant only to the extended transference of this poetic intext. Indeed, the dashes lend a rather literal meaning to the term “punctuation” since they appear to “puncture” the text through the horizontal “barriers” they manifest in their Qualisign disposition. These dashes halt decoding in sequence and hold up live memory momentarily as they “fence off” the last line. They help to project this concluding line as a type of “afterthought.” Sadly, the bowdlerized version depletes the poem of all these rich nuances by omitting Dickinson’s unique punctuation.

As for the last line, despite being encased by these dashes, there is no genuine disjointedness. In effect, through the dashes, this line becomes rather conspicuously “hooked on” to the rest of the poem. The line obviously jumps the gap by complementing the predicate adjective parataxis of the second line, though somewhat contracted for missing the comparative segment, as shown in “is . . . afraid” “is loud.” Again, the outer Iconic link is inwardly relevant in opposite meaning insofar as the fear follows from Etna’s subdued side and the loudness from her ostentatiously fierce demeanor. The parataxis extends to the left in the vertical alignment of the two initiating noun-subjects, “Naples” and “Security.” Rather cleverly, the mandatory capitalization of the geographical place name is passed on to the other noun, though only for intitiating its line. What both nouns also share conspicuously is that sharp singular circumference in a metonymic or synecdochal presentation of the “people” they harbor at depth. At the level of the Index, “Security” contrasts also with the predicate adjective, keeping Naples pivotal to living in fear of Etna and sensing security in Etna’s outer show of fierceness.

In conventional semantics, “Security” denotes an “abstraction,” despite its obvious “human” import as a sensation. In that respect, “Security” resembles Chomsky’s “Misery” example more closely than does Naples. Yet, again, Dickinson knows better than that and intuitively grasps the dynamic nature of meaning, here the natural, transmuted personification characterizing all such abstractions for denoting human dispositions. And, although this last line is not a saying as familiar as Chomsky’s example, its very generic tenor has a sententious ring to it that is reminiscent of a proverb or adage.

Certainly, with all the connotations and alignments elucidated, this line is not in need of Levin’s earlier cited amendment, “not soft (or quiet)” (p. 44). What is the flashy fang of the preceding line if not “loud” in its garish visibility? Dickinson, as stated, trades effectively on the sonorous visual nuances embodied in the synaesthesia of this adjective. The sight of this dentine is reassuring because it is so “loud” in its visibility, and the assonantal relation between “loud” and “shows” supports that import. That is not to say the sound image in “purrs” does not become contrastively reinforced as well. The point is that, qua linguistic competence, loudness here remains as “normal” in its acquired visual connotation as it does overtly in its sonorous denotation.

Everything set forth here has been derived from the Icons directly in their M-foregrounding and their deeper backgrounded 0-import. If intent on attaching to the meaning of this poem yet another loose proverb, one might Iconize its gist as, “There is safety in the devil one knows or sees.” In any case, there was not a single element, down to the operative punctuation marks, that did not contribute to the expression of this poem. All these constituents are structural metaphors that shift in order to lend their individual meaning explicitly and implicitly to the poet’s meaning because they were carefully selected for that purpose and none other.

As for the prevalent, indeed omnipresent “+Animation” Levin reserved for Etna, it could apply to almost everything, from Etna to Naples or “Security,” and even the “Garnet Tooth” as part of Etna’s “mouth.” In addition, Naples and Security became anthropomorphized in the manner explained. And Etna, as the female feline “she” is, does not lack that “human” touch either, for reasons of the indentation marking English “cat.” The point is, where does “metaphor” as lexical deviance begin and end by such assessments? If a “metaphor” of greater reliability than that of the Ingendahl Experiment is to be isolated, something more substantial must be sought for a domain such as language that crosses these bounds with ease in the most ordinary lingo. Now, Levin may be right, basically, by saying that the imagery “shows her Garnet Tooth” is equivalent to “a metaphor of a volcanic eruption” (pp. 43-44). He is thus positing an analogy between the display of such an eruption and the showy dentine that bridges the anomaly in their different states as topological and biological phenomena. That association has partially evolved also from my own construal, but only by heeding the meanings in all their essence. This is where Levin should put function before detail and then substantiate the function through the detail to demonstrate inductively how it goes into effect.

As was stated in the last analysis, the connotations may expand and/or shift somewhat in meaningfulness for the individual construer. But there is no getting around that careful, painstakingly positioned foregrounding Dickinson offered and which, when scrutinized, led to a fully backgrounded condensation or “compression” of a lyric ego at depth. All a non-Aristotelian metaphor needs is “approval” of the structure by the conditions outlined. Then even dashes as punctuation marks do their part as objects of expression for a totality of expression in accordance with what the author “meant.” This meaning was held together until the last dash had been decoded through the capacity of live memory, intensifying into a holistic intext.

A last analytic consideration before switching to the impact of an esthetic concretization is what might be qualified loosely as the wider “extrinsic” input. Thus Dickinson imagery may be secondarily supported from further evidence of her poetic diction. Literary scholarship has been much aided on that score by the availability of a Dickinson Concordance which covers the 1775 poems numbered in the Johnson editions. In brief, the concordance (1967, pp. 232, 516) lists just one other reference to “Etna” and “Naples,” from a couple of poems written somewhat earlier than this one, in 1862. Number 422 in the Complete Poems (1960/1975, pp 201-202) refers to “Etna’s Scarlets” and the other one, number 601 (p. 295), has a “Volcano” made explicit as Icon along with “Naples.” This poem closes also with dashes, for an imagery of “Cities” that “-ooze away-”. To indicate how these dashes also hold the imagery between them in a usage similar to the poem construed here, I have kept my own punctuation, the period, outside of them, as should be done. Besides the inclusion of dashes, the above imagery reveals also unique capitalization, although the singular seems less in evidence than in the poem I analyzed.

From an epochal standpoint governing inception versus reception, it is worth noting that the above two poems were subjected to an even greater time span than the poem of this analysis. Though their inception is dated 1862, their official entry in the way of publication did not materialize until 1935 for the first and 1929 for the second poem. And, of course, had there not been precursors to Levin’s logical dissection--apart from the bowdlerizers of his edition--those epochal gaps would not exist either, even for this reclusive woman poet. That issue is a full topic in itself when one looks into the posthumous fate of Dickinson’s work (as I have done).

With those added considerations at least adumbrated, I return to the poem of this analysis to give the esthetic values their due after having probed the artistic compositional values. Ironically, in piecing these together, I often had to fragment the poem by dwelling on odd and complex detail. To compensate for the analytic stance, a continuous, sequential concretization follows that is simultaneously “hermeneutic” enough to give live memory its due by heeding the assimilative or mnemonic-qualitative time phases. The fruition of this recipience should be harmonious polyphony among the interacting strata of backgrounding and foregrounding. In addition, a fully nominalized foregrounding in conventional scanning reveals what Dickinson experts (Pederson, 1944, pp. 80-82) have called the “short meter.” It consists mostly of trimeter, with an exception in the third line of this text, which displays tetrameter. So the conspicuous Garnet Tooth in its capitalized Qualisign dimensions ends up with strong rhythmic reinforcement as well. Careful scanning shows the rhythm supporting the capitalization of the poetic anagram by stressing first syllables in “Etna,”“Naples” and “Garnet.” In the case of the place names, the second weak or unstressed syllable of “Etna” is then “bestowed” on the city of “Naples” in Sinsign reversal, and returns, if modified, in “Garnet” as italicised. The full schema is offered below, first with and then without words.

The above schemas have the Garnet Tooth projected vertically in its Qualisign capitalization and horizontally in prosody through its extended length, invested as it becomes with its own two stresses. In a way, a climax is reached for the first three lines through this strong accentuation and the following dash which momentarily wards off the final line until this brief pause is overcome, whereupon this “afterthought,” as I termed it, takes full effect. As suggested, the intonation concluding the last line should not descend entirely either, as though the poem closed in the period of the bowdlerized version. Rather, the line holds its pitch sufficiently to keep the sententious nuance quizzical, as a partially enigmatic end. With added retroactive and hermeneutic readings, the staccato tenor of the dashes may subside somewhat, but not disappear.

By that time, live memory on the part of a superreader’s faculty will have gone into effect sufficiently well to assure the full expansion of the connotative compounding to which structural metaphors lend themselves. Aided by what the analytic stance culled from the various facets of the text, these metaphors display their nominalized wordsounds. During the esthetic concretization, these elements should make the poem come truly “alive” by appealing in vibrancy to all the senses and the fullest sensibilities. As the construct passes from encoded composite to a decoding and appropriately concretizing Recipient, the comment of the poet-critic Benn (1965, p. 510) begins to ring true, where he said of the poetic word that it becomes the very “phallus of the mind.”

Analysis: Hamburger on the Lyric I: Semantic Content or Connective in Celan?

The last analysis deals with a poem containing title and stanza as some of the optional components listed in the table of Rhemic hierarchies. An issue more important than these additions, however, is the question of Rhemic identity in a poem that manifests an asyntactic style. Actually, the more “poetic” the style, the easier it becomes for non-Aristotelian semantics to prove the structure. My theory was challenged most by the type of construct Brecht’s poem presented, since the “prosaic” surface seemed to counter its “poetic” depth. Below this illusive surface lay a structural connective which changed the essence also of the Icons with the proper Recipient response. I termed this holistic essence lyric ego. Amalgamated by the linguistic strata into semantic unities, the lyric ego becomes condensed into a backgrounded import and is made to cohere as a foregrounded Iconic M-base through the two literary Rhemic strata.

The poem to be treated in my last analysis, however, was chosen by Kate Hamburger on account of a disrupted surface that posed problems of lyric identity for her. Hamburger’s Logic of Literature has been cited more than once in this study, in part because the work, despite its title, manifested a “logical” breakdown by aligning literal and lyric “statements” as one function. Although Hamburger’s logical focus is on the whole to be commended for avoiding a lexical orientation, in this case she unwittingly falls prey to content by supposing that lyric self-expression incorporates a real “self” as speaking subject. She assumes that just because the eloquent “lyric I” of poetry seems to “say” something rather than “tell” stories, this saying equals the essence of any statement. “The much-disputed lyric I,” she claims confidently, “is a statement subject” (1968, p. 188; 1973, trans., p. 234).

Terms as such are not at issue: Hamburger may call the lyric ego a “lyric I” and/or a “statement subject.” But there has to be a definitive boundary instead of the “open” transition between everyday and esthetic use Hamburger maintains. Leaning on an occasional “sense-nexus” that is to distinguish poetry from the language bearing a “reality-nexus” only exacerbates problems of consistency, unless such criteria are systematically differentiated. They obviously did not aid Hamburger either, since her application of the “lyric I” sometimes designates a functional nonlexical base as in her above assertion and in other instances amounts to little more than content taxonomy.

Hamburger’s asyntactic example for illustrating a problematic “lyric I” is a poem by Paul Celan (1920-1970), who, though born in Rumania, has been classed with “German” authors since he wrote mostly in that language. His text, which stems from a cycle entitled Mohn und Gedächtnis (1970, p. 45), exhibits a disrupted syntax to some extent and is in that sense “modern.” Still, I put this periodic qualifier in quotes because it should never be reified; even the most avant-garde antiart attempts (Gumpel, 1976, pp. 49-52) do not break away entirely from conventional art, a fact this poem should prove conclusively. Certainly, the surface does not affect the Rheme as structure but still supports its function, as stated. Hamburger (1968, pp. 203-204; 1973, pp. 253-254), on the other hand, is sufficiently taken aback by the asyntactic surface to insist that it requires a reverse procedure in construal. The lack of a thematic unity, which she terms “object-relation,” causes her to contend that single words need to be probed first in order to arrive at any sense nexus (Sinnzusammenhang).

Well, since I have followed such a procedure all along, this particular text should present no problem other than paying special attention to the new additions cited. The bilingual version below, incorporating my own translation, appeared in the Hamburger edition (1968, p. 203; 1973, p. 253). Her comments on the “lyric I” in reference to this poem are to follow. My bilingual presentation, moreover, enables me to illustrate further the “coercive” role of language when involving a non-adequated structure located at the M-base. The startling impact of the minutest change never ceases to surprise me, and I shall express this reaction in what appears to be occasional misgivings about the choices I made. But underlying these reservations is mainly the didactic intent to let the reader glean once more the tremendous power of the non-Aristotelian, structural metaphor that suffuses every facet of a text. Well, here is this metaphor, concreted in Icons and interlocking Indexes.

Ins Nebelhorn

Mund im verborgenen Spiegel,

Knie vor der Säule des Hochmuts,

Hand mit dem Gitterstab:

reicht euch das Dunkel,

nennt meinen Namen,

führt mich vor ihn.

Into the foghorn

mouth in the concealed mirror,

knee before the pillar of disdain,

hand with the grid-iron stave:

pass on the darkness to one another,

call my name,

lead me before him.

On the basis of this text, Hamburger (1973, p. 253-254) contends that the “lyric I does not experience itself as a personal whole, but as mouth, knee, and hand, which have no mutual connection . . .” She is interpreting content, similar to my calling Brecht’s “pronominal hero” a “lyric I” when analyzing that text as Rheme. The “lyric I” as structural concept, however, is contextual and not a “personal” whole; its “mutual connections” lie in poetic intext irrespective of content. Nor is “experience” involved, but rather a mode of expression whose ground lies in an extended transaction between reference and transference. The “lyric I” Hamburger cites here is just M, the content in thetic I-M-0 generation. Yet the true catalyst should be I, the Interpretant as signitive act, deploying these selected explicit and implicit contents for its foregrounded materialization in Icons and backgrounded embodiment in relevant Indexes.

An analogy that might be pertinent for Hamburger as a neo-Kantian would be the transcendental ego posited by Kant in the First Critique (1913, Cassirer, ed., III, p. 114). Kant presented this ego as a metaphysical connective for all possible self-consciousness, thus not as “physical” consciousness of the self in this or that content. Without going into such weighty matters as a transcendental divide that encompasses all being, one nevertheless may draw on the parallel that a lyric “I” here transcends content as the apriori connective without which no concretion of the Rheme is even possible. Once the connective is there in compliance with the esthetic ought through appropriate Recipient stance, the Referent will be disclosed accurately--and no differently here than in any other case, thus without any modified or “reversed” procedure.

Let me begin, then, with the analysis to prove my point by following prior methods of construal after submitting content to a first heuristic scanning, which reveals immediately the presence of a title and two stanzas as the new elements cited. Beyond these obvious inclusions, few poems bear Rhemic recursiveness in spatial fusion more conspicuously than this one, making it relatively easy to endorse the structure. That applies even to certain areas of translation. In Brecht’s prosaic poem, the translator is challenged to follow parallel rules that closely intertwine syntax with semantics--ironically, to affirm what must still surface differently, thus forcing the M-base further apart. A case in point was the relative pronoun: in the transition from German to English it split into four versions, each of which contained a different problem that could not be solved conclusively for the sense in conjunction with changes in sequence, a relation so important for Rhemic intextual fusion.

Indeed, the Celan text projects that fusion rather conspicuously. While my illustration of Argument included a page “frame” to suggest margins within which the text falls loosely, the Rhemic frame itself holds each element to its precise positioning. From the title on there is a marked horizontal or bilateral symmetry which in turn reinforces paratactic vertical identity. Bare nouns and verbs lie to the left of the respective stanzas, prepositional phrases and/or direct objects to their right. Accordingly, there is a type of conventional anaphora and epiphora, even if not accompanied by intricate rhyme schemes. The right, prepositional side establishes a direct Iconic linkage between title and text to illustrate the original “steering power” of the title. The more interpretive, Indexical associations in this relationship have to be culled from the detailed construal of individual lines.

Convention is certainly presented by the other new components, the stanzas. Despite lacking rhyme schemes, these stanzas in their triadic patterns reflect tradition by simulating the tercines that hark back to Dante (1265-1321) and possibly also the tercets that composed parts of a sonnet, the popular historical genre of long standing. When one distinguishes the stanzas, the first may appear more “modern,” since its lines are asyntactic by lacking predicates. While the second stanza instead has no subjects, this omission is supported by the fact that the initiating verbs are imperatives. As discussed in connection with Levin, imperatives generally suppress their subjects. Both stanzas, moreover, comply with careful punctuation at the end of lines--replete with standard commas, a colon, and a concluding period In one way the punctuation makes all lines appear “syntactic” and in another it helps to “serialize” them as one takes over separately from the next in continuation of the tercines, demarkated at the other, left side by the initiating elements described. There is thus an overall impression of an “orderly” style. In comparison to this text, Dickinson’s poem may have been somewhat more “syntactic” and yet stayed “asyntactic” through its unique punctuation.

However, one stylistic feature Celan’s first stanza shares with the former poem is the appearance of the singular in the initiating nouns. True, there is just one mouth per face, but knees and hands usually come in pairs--and more numbers for quadrupeds. Their marked “singularity” also is enhanced by their lack of the usual accouterments regarding articles and/or adjectives. Thus stark and bare, the tenor of these nouns reinforces that metonymic, synecdochal quality cited with the former poem: the nouns stand as “one” for the “many” and in that capacity also assume the semantic nuance of collective nouns. The “collective” aspect, in fact, receives some special significance when the nouns gain a certain communal relevance recursively through the imperatives that German casts in the plural, as these “usurp” the left-sided slot in the second stanza.

Since the nouns designate parts of the body, they readily depict the traditional “corporal metaphors” which were treated briefly in this study (in reference to Curtius, 1963, pp. 136-138), mainly to be contrasted with “personality metaphors.” In the latter case, the human disposition becomes endowed with the qualities of inanimate matter while corporal metaphors impose parts of the body upon matter. In trading on a conventional fund of imagery, then, these nouns may well recall the “places,” the Greek “topoi” (“topos” in singular) which anchor content with a certain subject matter. On the other hand, in their left-sided rank-and-file serialization, both the nouns and verbs may reflect additionally a “modern” style by creating types of “rows” or “columns” not far removed from patterns of the experimentalist clusters that compose some “Constellations” of Concrete Poetry (see Gumpel, 1976, pp. 39-41, 50-57, 92-95 ff.). Thus, in this poem new and old stylization coincides in unexpected and yet harmonious ways.

By comparison to the symmetry of the original, my translation may be described as “sprawling,” especially since it does not taper off the way the original does in the last two lines. Yet another one of those frustrating changes mentioned in my other analyses stems from the need to preserve the nouns in lower case as befits English syntax, but that decision may not have been my happiest choice either. So this is yet another instance where capitalization becomes a stumbling block when the translator has to second-guess the authorial will in the “coercion” of the language at hand. My decision was based on Celan’s standardized usage in German. Celan s adherence to syntactic norms of capitalization rather than the more recent experimentalist tendency toward lower case also forced me to omit this practice unnatural to English syntax in order to convey a parallel standardization. Indeed, Celan put the priority on syntactic norms rather than conventional poetics, since he ignored the onset of lines sufficiently to keep the imperatives of the second stanza uncapitalized. Due to this subtle antiart phenomenon, I dared not capitalize the nouns simply because they initiated their lines. Yet the detailed construal will disclose that the nouns serve as “vocatives” and, thus confronted in a type of address, they might have tolerated capitalization. Since Celan traded on what his language offered, my vacillation may never be resolved.

With these general comments out of the way, the detailed analysis begins with the title. When the analysis reaches the second stanza, the entire poem will be repeated, mainly to preserve the coherence between what has been construed and held in live memory and what is as yet to be decoded. Although a title may be optional, its vital input when added to the intertextual Iconic and Indexical relations should now become self-evident. Because of the strict symmetry of this poem, the lines are “centered” slightly to preserve a bilingual parallelism.

Ins Nebelhorn
(Into the foghorn)

For once English, the analytic language, extends further in syntagma than the German. English has to Iconize motion by the added “to” of “Into”--as was demanded also of the Brecht poem for the activity of the Finnish “friends”--and the complete definite article “the.” Both these elements are caught in the German “s” morpheme of the “Ins,” standing for the definite-neuter article “das,” which in gender has to agree with the last segment, “horn,” of the grammatical object, the “Nebelhorn.” The German preposition “in,” furthermore, is called a “two-way” (also “either/or”) preposition because it takes both accusative and dative cases, signaling “motion” with the former and the opposite with the latter. Accordingly, this tiny “s” morpheme as nominalized Singsign here conveys “motion” and mediates between the “In-” preposition and its object, the “Nebelhorn.”

Something is “moving along” the foghorn; a “passageway” or “thoroughfare” has been created, conveying simultaneously the hollow, cylindrical nature of the “Nebelhorn.” In view of the “-horn,” this minuscule “s” Icon releases a “voice” going “through” the foghorn as relevant Index. While the (autonomous-)real nautical instrument may well own that type of cylindrical circumference, all “contours” to be perceived here must be gleaned from linguistic Qualisigns; everything has to be derived from the Icons and the Indexes they emit in relevance to the whole.

Although English possesses the adjective “nebulous,” which in paraphrasing may loosely describe the first segment of the German foghorn, no part of that Sinsign enters the text in such compounded form, since no such Legisgn exists. While the “horn” seems to be a cognate of the German, even this identity is misleading since all potential reference lies embedded in the hyletic-noematic (M-0) trichotomies of one language. That point may be shown once more with an earlier example, the “unicorn,” thus the mythological, one-horned creature German renders as “Einhorn.” Whereas the matching last segment in “Nebelhorn” registers an Iconic doubling fit for any potential wordplay, English “foghorn” and “unicorn” remain barred from similar Iconization.

In both languages, however, the foghorn discloses some interesting aspects when submitted to maximal analytic stance. Surveyed at some distance, the nautical instrument sends out one message in attribution and another in linguistic competence. A horn “composed of” fog? That is what the Iconic syntagma renders in Sinsign composites but hardly what the indented Legisign designates, namely an instrument operative in fog which aids sight through sound when ships are stranded by this meterological phenomenon. Native speakers “know” the difference. Such is the power of language as bearer of meaning that it can be so seemingly casual in rendering its meanings. What anchors each Index to its cognition is the concept and category it bears as indented word, as wielded Icon now residing within the signitive convolutions of one language. No encyclopedic knowledge about worlds, but only a cognizance of word(s) as vehicles for speech determines the semantic roots of language in a language-a truism still ignored today by most critics of language theory (Gumpel, 1974, pp. 180-81).

At the same time, foregrounding is so vital to the Rheme that a Recipient must be a most alert superreader. Thus the “Nebel-” segment of this title becomes a negative image of visual obfuscation and the “horn” conversely a positive image of sonorous affirmation. Each segment stresses different aspects that reappear in the ensuing text. In both languages, the “-horn” provides the type of “thoroughfare” for the voice already noted, and that relevant Index then establishes the textual relation with the nouns as “vocatives.” The “voice” erupts as the “addressor” and the following nouns as its “addressees,” retaining this relation throughout the first stanza. However, there is little room for a “lyric I” that automatically becomes one with the noun vocatives in the manner Hamburger suggested. So the “connectives” she missed have formed already from the titular-textual interaction as construed so far. If anything, the immediate association between voice and vocatives has to be diverse, imparting an “I-you” confrontation rather than identity even if, logically, one is to assume that the voice talks to itself through (its) parts of the body. The first line of the text should lend further support to my interpretation. In the centering mentioned, the German and English vocatives appear immediately below one another.

Mund im verborgenen Spiegel,

(mouth in the concealed mirror,)

While the voice seems concreted as “Mund,” it also confronts this organ as though it had a separate being. This noun does not parallel the prepositional unit of the title but instead becomes the “new” textual element which then creates the horizontal left-to-right symmetry typical of the entire first stanza. Although the two way preposition “in” returns, it is this time contracted as “im,” where the “m” morpheme is taken from the definite-dative article “dem” and thus signals “no motion” as explained. As modifier of the preposition’s grammatical object, the “Spiegel,” the “m” becomes here by coincidence a type of logo for the masculine gender of that noun. With the mouth caught in a static, “concealed” mirror through the attributive past participle “verborgenen,” there seems no escape possible from the predicament of visual obfuscation that causes this Index accordingly to interlock with the “Nebel “of the same import.

What does it mean for the mouth to be in a “concealed mirror”? At first glance, mouth and mirror combine to suggest a type of “vanity,” especially since a Petrarchistic past has long traded on the mouth topos of a romantic poetry that rendered the object of one’s love in embellished rose petal lips, pearly white teeth, and a sweet breath. Vanity, indeed, may not be absent from the implications here, if more on a metaphysical order of vanitas, a mortal state. For it is the curious fate of the holder of a mouth never to behold it with the naked eye. “Real” as this organ feels for its capacity to speak, eat, drink, and thus engage in functions incorporating three of the five senses--sound, taste, and touch-it cannot ever be seen. The face containing this organ never “faces” itself in any direct self identity, one might say. Only another face, a “you” instead of an “I,” may espy the mouth of this voice. Who but a poet like Celan would ever draw attention to such a predicament, common though it is and yet strange as it becomes when one is thus made conscious of it?

In a wider Classical implication of ontological hierarchies that hark back to Plato’s Cave Simile, reflection is a lesser state of being; never equaling “reality,” it is several removes away from it. In that light, then, the mirror becomes ontologically a “mirage” where a primary state of being is concerned. The mirror “conceals” by “keeping” the real mouth and throwing back only a reflection of it which, consisting essentially of glass, is feeble and ready to shatter at any moment. Beyond this mirage, the mirror as structural metaphor of this poem renders all self-identity as another one of those Nietzschean metaphysical “metaphors,” the extramoral “lie.” Surely, the esthetic image or “Bild” Nietzsche affirmed simultaneously as no more or less a lie and which at least manages to combine the uncombinable comes through in the Icons of this poem. There are no Icons of ships in the text to substantiate the “object-relation” Hamburger sought. But an eloquent coherence begins to form nevertheless between the titular meteorological image and this metaphysical predicament or, in view of the latest construal, the metaphorical type of existence humans are not able to escape, cannot de-anthropomorphize with their limited faculties, of which the corporal and corporeal mouth is one.

Behind that eloquence, moreover, resides that other linguistic “mouth,” the Lutheran “muzzle” my study introduced in the early part that also included Nietzsche, mainly to prove the purposive essence of language itself. This muzzle, too, demonstrates how hard it becomes to combine the uncombinable one language has wrought in another language, to the point of converting me unwittingly into one of those “after-poet” translators. Thus the English Icons combine “mouth” and “mirror” in their own Iconic reflection through an “m” alliteration. Language, the “Mother,” has cast this Qualisign material so distinctively that I cannot imitate it without distorting the Referent within the translated poem. Thus English also forces me into an overt “the” pleonasm through an excessive Iconic linkage between title and text, simply because the German contractions cannot be copied. With these issues aired, I move sequentially to the second line,

Knie vor der Säule des Hochmuts,

(knee before the pillar of disdain,)

The content opening the vocative noun seems to have moved to the other extreme of the human physiognomy. Indeed, “extremity” is the right word, since the “Knie” (with “/kn/” pronounced) designates part of the limb supporting head and torso, thus including the mouth. This corporal metaphor almost picks up verbatim the conventional topos of humility, which was not the case with the Petrarchan mouth. The knee image thus appears in its traditional role of supplication. I recall Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, (Harrison, ed., 1952, V, i, verses 436, 439, 442 and 447, p. 1134), for example, where the knee in the act of kneeling and “lending a knee” in deference plays a rather prominent part. What reinforces the Index of “humility” within this poem, moreover, is first of all the “lack of mobility” conveyed by yet another two-way preposition, “vor,” which, through the (uncontracted) definite-dative article “der,” releases that implication. The knee stops dead before the grammatical object of the preposition, the “Säule,” whose feminine gender is carried also by the article. Through the conventional image, the knee indeed is made to “stoop” in genuflexion before the vertical structure this Icon bears.

Were it not for the traditional topos, that full import of humility could not present itself so readily in the inertia of the limb that the dative supplies. Conversely, the pillar image rises in all its tall, aloof arrogance, especially through the genitiue link of “des Hochmuts” (see Brooke-Rose, 1958, pp. 146-205). In the translation, the uncapitalized nouns quite literally “fall flat” through their rounded Qualisign dispositions, as shown in “der Säule des Hochmuts” versus “the pillar of disdain.” A closer Icon to the German may have been “hauteur” or “haughtiness,” but either choice would have produced other semantic and rhythmic complications. For once, too, it is English which blocks reiteration of the definite genitive “des” between pillar and disdain, just as German syntax demands. That hurts the import of the original, since the definite pleonasm-doubly so within the genitive link-solidifies all those objects: accusative, dative, and genitive, from title to text, firm into a “definite opposition,” to Iconize that Index. Although Celan’s use of the definite is not quite “syntactic,” because no clearcut nominal antecedents are established for each of these objects (to thus merit rather an indefinite article), the “poetic” application would go too far if I forced “(of) the disdain” into Iconization here. That English muzzle, powerful as concreted ontic heteronomy in an unskeptical view, continues to intervene and prevent me from taking such liberties.

The same point can be proven again when glancing at the German Sinsign composite for disdain, the “Hochmut.” Its “Hoch-”segment becomes Iconized as “high” and although the compound has its own indentation as complete Legisign, this inference should not be missed by a superreader alert to the M-base. Indeed, even the “H” Sinsign accentuates that height in its vertical Qualisign disposition and as such becomes yet another poetic “hieroglyph” or “ideogram,” resembling in that respect the dentine image of Dickinson’s poem. Nor can a “Hoch-mut,” hyphenated or literalized from the Icons, be dismissed entirely as “high spirits,” which in medieval times embodied satanic arrogance. In this context, though, that sense of superiority does not lie on the “mortal” left side of corporal and corporeal organs or limbs, but rather on the “immortal” right side of impenetrable, indifferent opposition--as viewed from that other side. These evolving “sides” reflect German notions of “Diesseits” and “Jenseits,” meaning “this side” on earth versus that transcendent “other side” “beyond” it. Thus, the bilateral symmetry of this poem projects a stark metaphysical division between immanence and transcendence, reinforced by an eloquent spatial fusion characterizing the Rheme: the solid opposition cannot be damned but only cursed by those unable to circumvent or penetrate it.

Through the genitive link, indeed, the distance embodied in disdain begins to suggest a type of “conspiracy,” more poignant than mere concealment would indicate. The erect pillar, by implication and Iconization towering over the bent knee, has become injected with animation, has been personified through the volitional stance of disdain. Localized spotsighting thus allows the image to demonstrate a perfect case of selectional violation; the neo-Aristotelian metaphor appears as lexical deviance based on a “transference” between the cold stony edifice and an equally “hard” or “stony” disposition. Indeed, the anthropomorphized pillar becomes invested with a type of “personality metaphor” through its implied human disposition, “cold” and deliberately unyielding of nature. So here is an “anthropomorphic” fate mortals face; Nietzsche construed it as a “lying,” “metaphorical” existence. Ironically, the pillar is humanized only to be dehumanized, since that is the only means for dealing with such an unfathomable beyond, imposing a few sensations of self-identity upon an ineffable enemy, which, couched in negative imagery, becomes converted into a mirror or a pillar.

As for the disdainful pillar as localized metaphor, it may be thus described as long as the limits of selectional violation are realized. Anything pertaining to sheer content taxonomy otherwise leaves a critic as undecided about metaphor’s extent and state as were the participants of the Ingendahl Experiment. Thus English has already normalized a personality metaphor that refers to an individual as a “pillar of strength.” With such internalized redundance, the image here may appear more “literal” than “metaphorical,” depending on the frequency of Symbolic feedforward and feedback deployed by the Recipient-in other words, on how often the Icon “pillar” is wielded as idiom by the concretizing person. Mass media exposure would firm sensations of familiarity, possibly to the point of phasing out “metaphorical” Ought-Values, leaving behind instead merely flattened Is-Values of “meaning.”

Fortunately, the Rheme’s content-insensitive structural metaphors cannot disappear or “die” unless the entire poetic intext degenerated to the level of Qualisigns--a deceased M-base! As long as the language is alive, so are the constructs it forms, as also their components. When Rhemic, these piece together the backgrounded and foregrounded strata of this strucutre, engendering thereby a lyric ego. Thus no vacillation arises on that score, since “transference” is functionally derived from tasks of contextualization, irrespective of deviant lexical pockets. Every nominalized nuance becomes affected by this processing, including also the accusative and dative cases. Live memory then holds in check the compounded import as the right-sided opposition takes yet another turn with the introduction of the noun vocative in the third line,

Hand mit dem Gitterstab:

(hand with the grid-iron stave:)

Although in one examination of taxonomy (of a nineteenth-century woman poet) I discovered that “hand” was the most popular topos through the potential range of gestures the image offers, its meaning in this line probably remains the most abstruse, if not to the point of requiring any of Hamburger’s “reverse” procedures. Since “mit” always takes the dative, the preposition does not aid construal as directly as the earlier two-way prepositions did. Still, the fact that dative “dem” surfaces-in the masculine for the “stab” segment of the grammatical object--as yet another definite article has to become significant. This vestige completes the central definite-dative section for the entire stanza in the reiterated “im”/“vor dem”/”mit dem” that leads directly into the “opposition.”

The definite article thus continues to provide a crucial Iconic link, especially for this bulky compound, which at first glance is as impenetrable as the “opposition” itself. Indeed, the “Gitterstab” constitutes a poetic neologism and as such bears no validated Legisign engendering an indented Icon with an Indexical periphery. That is to say, the word as compound does not exist outside of this intextual frame; it has no part in the latent oppositional system of shared signitive convolutions and would thus be starred (*) were it not for its derived significance within this immediate context. The segments of the compound, to be sure, are Legisigns and thus aided my tanslation of the tripartite “grid-iron stave.” For “Gitter” denotes generally something like an “iron grid” composed of “bars” or “railings” that suggest a “barrier.” Since neuter “Gitter-,” like the “Zimmer” in the Brecht poem, has a null plural morpheme, number was no help either. Lastly, the “stab,” translated as “stave,” may signify a ceremonial “staff’ or a “crosier.”

How can this abstruse object be brought together with the “Hand” in such a marked asyntactic setting? What does “with” imply here? Somehow, one may be reminded of a Marcel Marceau mime, the one which has flattened palms (though of both hands) with fingers uppermost touch unseen bars as if to assess bounds and the limited space left within them. Is the “Gitterstab” with its “Hand” a type of barrier conveying that mortals remain incarcerated in their own limitations? Then that lying “metaphorical” reality has turned into a “cage” enveloped by the “opposition.” Though inscrutable, the grid iron stave also implies an “intimacy” evoked by the closeness “with” suggests. Does this mean that the “Hand” is indelibly marked by this stave as though bearing it as a “wound”? If so, the Icons interlock to release something equivalent to a “stain”--perhaps the stigmata of Christ!

Although Celan was Jewish, this construal would not be that farfetched for his poetic idiolect. The cycle (1970, p. 58) containing this poem includes another entry whose very title, “Die feste Burg,” trades on one of Luther’s hymns of the strong or mighty fortress. Also, I am reminded of Celan’s poem “Psalm,” which obviously refers to the Old Testament but also bears an allusion to the (bloodstained?) Crown of Thorns in the imagery of a “corolla red” (in the bilingual Michael Hamburger edition of 1976, pp. 304-307). Similarly, a Christian type of “epiphany” may well apply to this poem’s bilateral “confrontation” between the “Diesseits” and “Jenseits” already discussed, even if some of the connotations are secularized to impart human suffering through a sense of total inadequacy.

The radius of significance weighting this line may well illustrate Ingarden’s idea (1965, pp. 149-151, 270) of semantic “opalescence” (Opalisierung), leaving all of the implications valid and oscillating in their ramified if not univocally conclusive import. Furthermore, my resorting to Celan’s poetic diction in terms of a Judaic Christian tradition may be defined as an “extrinsic” aid. Such recourse is justified and often vital, but must never outweigh the “intrinsic” dimensions obtained from the text’s own Qualisign ground. This ground certainly displays also a Christian type of dichotomy between light and dark, the latter reinforced by the obscurity of the “Gitterstab” for contributing more of that “nebulous” opposition.

One remaining item of the first stanza’s concluding line is the punctuation mark: the colon reflects the usual kind of “juncture” which gathers the serialized lines into an “aforesaid,” leading from there into an “opening” of what follows. However, even this colon, like the dashes in Dickinson’s text, has been nominalized into a structural metaphor, lending its meaning to the intextual meaning. Very concrete is its Qualisign disposition of two dots, creating a type of cylindrical “tunnel” or “channel” that lets the voice through to the imperatives. The colon thus accomplishes at a more degenerate level what the titular elements began: through it, the first half of this text concludes with yet another foregrounded “passageway.” The voice, which first reached the text via the accusative and “horn,” is now relayed to the text’s second stanza via the colon. No matter how automatic the operative role of a colon under normal syntactic conditions, here this vestige shapes a lyric ego through Rhemic backgrounding and foregrounding. To do justice to the colon’s role as “juncture” between the stanzas, I cite the entire text once more.

Käte Hamburger (1968, p. 203; 1973, p. 253) has some fruitful comments on the role of this colon as a unique point of transition that affects especially the imperatives: it “indicates that the second person plural imperatives comprising the three lines of the second stanza refer to the parts of the body previously named.” This type of plural is the “familiar” in contrast to the formal or polite use. The “reference” Hamburger mentions creates semantic interlacing, which is fitting for the tercines of these stanzas, though at the Iconic level the original order has been disrupted: “pass” obviously belongs to the “hand,”“call” to the initiating “mouth,” and the ability to get up and “lead” to the “knee,” the “middle” vocative that now closes the entire poem.

Although the concluding period at the end of this stanza adds a touch of finality that was conspicuously absent in Dickinson’s poem, the Icons comprising noun vocatives and imperatives come to a natural halt as their respective material contents are exhausted, which is not to say that, thematically, an ultimate solution has been found. As for the number in which the imperatives are cast, the plural “t” morpheme is the Sinsign that carries the missing plural “you” subject, in German “ihr,” something English cannot imitate. The “t” Sinsign thus unites all the imperatives in their “finitude”-and provides the evidence which caused Ingarden, used to inflected languages, to ascribe a greater functionality to the direction-factor of verbs than nouns, even if the “nominalized” imperatives are structurally nouns as well and thus possess the intensified potency of a nominal direction-factor. The nominalized “t” Sinsign thus gathers up also all the vocatives of the preceding stanza, even as each imperative Icon takes its cue from a particular noun. Aiding the general significance is this stanza’s “central” portion: where the definite-dative appeared before, a personalization has taken over, with an almost perfect vertical alignment between “euch,” “meinen,” and “mich.” The first of these pronouns is a reciprocal type that as Index interlocks with the “t” Sinsign of the verbs by bearing also the familiar plural. Everything else should emerge with the detail, here starting with the first line,

reicht euch das Dunkel,

(pass on the darkness to one another,)

The hand is challenged in its capacity at least to reach out and share “communally” that “dark” fate, as the collective “t” plural underscores, together with the reciprocal “euch.” One might Iconize the gist loosely in the proverb Chomsky cited for his selectional violation, “Misery loves company,” or one might verbalize it as “There is compensation in commiseration.” In a sense “misery” does return with the somber “das Dunkel,” still clad in the definite to match recursively the right-sided opposition. Although the hyletic inventory of German also owns an adjectival “dunkel,” the noun matters for the addition of the definite article and for continuing the nuance of “obstacle” a definitive “thing” can convey more readily. Of course, the dark is grammatically also an object, though this time of a verb rather than preposition. Actually, this verb takes two objects, where “thing” such as the darkness is direct, accusative object, and where “persons” such as the “euch” constitute an indirect, dative alternative--ready to become “receiver(s)” of this action. Thus Indexicalized, the darkness “changes hands.”

As Sinsign composite, the “Dunkel” returns all the way to the fog of the instrument and to the visual concealment of the mirror, indeed reflecting the “gel” of “Spiegel” by reverberating in mute sound and visual sign the “kel” of “Dunkel,” while the vocalic-nasal “un” then reaches diagonally across to the “Mund.” Although thus crossing sides, the “Dunkel” may do so, in the sense that the mouth led to the first opposition on the other side while the dark on that side now lifts, or, more specifically, is made to lift through the Indexical return of the mouth in the Icon of naming.

Before I reach that point in the text, however, a word about possible choices omitted from my translation of this line. In comparison to the original, the English seems unwieldy and detracts from the indigenous symmetry. Certainly, “darkness” could have been changed to the substantive “dark,” but at the time I preferred this Icon. I might have omitted also the verbal complement in “pass on,” allowing the Index to become absorbed sufficiently by the final “to one another,” regrettable as it is that the pronoun “euch” simply has to be shifted and extended this way. In addition, the English inventory does possess the verb Icon “reach” as a closer Sinsign to “reicht,” but does not Indexicalize into a matching import. Then English also bears a verbal cognate for “hand” which, when used, would forge an unnatural pleonasm between the vocative and imperative, particulary since nouns are not capitalized in this language. The translator is then pounding in where an author stays subtle by making the “hand . . . hand on. . . .” With these possibilities at least entertained, I turn to the stanza’s second line,

nennt meinen Namen,

(call my name,)

The M-base really comes into its own in the foregrounded Qualisign nazalization, which appears immediately with “nennt” and horizontally weaves in and out of the entire line as shown with my italicised “nennt meinen Namen”The closest nasal profusion, especially in matching capitalization, the title bears with “Ins Nebelhorn.” Gone, too, is the “dark” back-vowel “/u/” in “Dunkel,” replaced instead by the recurring front vowel “e” of title and text. The “Mund” straddles positive and negative imagery with its strong nasalization and matching dark “u” vowel. But instead of its concealment, “Mund” goes into action through the imperative, removing the last “dark” cloud of opposition on that side. Accordingly, the “voice” attains yet another “voice” through the mouth’s capacity to speak . . . out. The positive sound begun with “horn” has finally conquered the negative, obfuscating vision of “Nebel .”

Added to the affirmation is the progressive personalization, imparting renewed confidence through self-assertion: the plural, collective “euch” yields to a distinctive first-person possessive adjective, the “meinen” accompanying the name which, in its slot, has forced out the definite that went with the opposition. The “meinen Namen” as direct-accusative object, consisting of the masculine name and its possessive, retains a syntactic if not an overt Sinsign identity with the darkness that has lifted. Cast in the possessive and the naming, the voice attains enhanced self-identity. Hamburger (1968, p. 204; 1973, p. 254) thus has a point when she says that “name is person to a far greater degree than mouth, knee, or hand.” The voice “through” the foghorn finally comes to the fore.

The concluding line and Hamburger’s final comments will indicate, however, where this critic stays misled in her search for lyric identity at all cost. But first I see fit to question once more my own translation. As with the “hand,” English owns a verbal, uncapitalized cognate that might have induced a pleonastic “name my name” in yet another overburdened stylization. That I avoided. But to enhance the symmetry through a use paralleling the verbal complement in “pass on,” I might have added “call out,” yet decided against such an extension.

In any case, the bilingual version demonstrates that the faculty of naming in speech, with which the “Mund” becomes empowered here, is of greater “mental” exertion than the “manual” vector of sharing carried out by the “Hand” in the passing on of the darkness. Next, the act of leading exemplifies a decidedly “physical” activity as the only remaining imperative lets the “Knie” finally come into its own in the last line:

führt mich vor ihn.

(lead me before him.)

The task of leading, exacted of the “Knie” vocative through the imperative, involves complete motion of the whole body. The movement as such evokes loosely the idea of life as a path to be trodden or traversed, with hurdles overcome on the way. Thus, in a wider Index, the connotations embody Christian salvation, going all the way back to the Patristic age of St. Augustine and reaching into the late Middle Ages with such works as The Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan (1628-1688), for example. In a more immediate and secularized construal, the knee’s static, humble posture of the first stanza is to be traded in for confident advancement in this stanza. To Iconize this intextual connection, there is the same two-way preposition, the “vor” of the second line. But through the (transitive) verb of motion, the “führt,” this preposition now acquires an accusative object.

As the line reads, the “vor” separates the two final accusative pronouns, “mich” and “ihn,” with the former a direct object of the imperative and the other of the “activated” preposition, as explained. In concrete Iconization, the syntagma “mich vor ihn” projects the preposition as “intervening” between the two pronouns a final barrier warding off a full approach to the right side, if far less bulky than the former objects on that side. These objects, in fact, mount in the final pronoun “ihn,” robbed of all “definite” accouterments as befits such an operative sign. Schematic in its amorphous material content, this unobtrusive pronoun discloses mainly that it is cast in the masculine third person. Compared to this pronoun, the “mich” of the voice has at least solidified into greater independence when compared to the former “meinen” in the same first person, which was still a possessive adiective.

So the voice has come as far as it can go, facing this transmuted opposition, if more independently in its naming prowess and pronominal state than before. The “ihn” the voice faces is overtly just an operative sign but covertly constitutes an eidetic, because nominalized element bearing the brunt of the construal when aided by the recursive powers of live memory. Even if Celan never read the theories of Ingarden, he intuitively trades on the abstruse, schematic nature of this pronoun, much as Dickinson was shown to be keenly aware of her signitive convolutions, the indentations of English. Fused to its right-sided Rhemic space, this “ihn,” like Atlas, implicitly carries the weight of the obstacles from that side, interlocking with all these elements and burgeoning accordingly at the level of the Index, no matter how narrow the material content of its Icon.

Ingarden (1965, pp. 159-160) actually explicates how the more functional direction-factor of a schematic pronoun gets set “identically” with a nominal antecedent in order to absorb nominal content while creating intersyntactic “connections” (Zusammenhange). Since no concatenation of syntactic correlates applies to the Rheme, the coherence is more implicit, depending on Indexical interlocking, which then causes even this pronominal direction-factor to expand by pointing centripetally inward as a content vital to the fullest contextualization. Here, the “ihn” thus constitutes the immortal reflection of the mortal “mich” while it has literally “the last word.” The imperatives carried the voice as the “mich” forward, but perlocutionary compliance does not have to follow a command, no matter how strong the illocutionary force of appeal. Thus there may be a dim hope of reaching the “ihn” held back by the “vor,” yet no wish is necessarily fulfilled.

All elements as structural metaphors have thus done their work, exuding meaning from meanings and rendering a thematic whole through inner interlocking. Meteorological imagery became intertwined with a metaphysical predicament. Indestructible functional metaphors, no matter what their lexical denomination, transferred their own sense to the significance of the whole, conveying thematically a “metaphorical” state of human existence, complete with all the impenetrable barriers that amount to Nietzsche’s extramoral lie. Yet “truth” rests ultimately in the disclosure of a new world through these words; a tiny verbal vortex of human creativity came to the fore as the esthetic unhiddenness or symbolic synthesis of Heidegger’s and Cassirer’s notions of truth. As contents tied to their context, these functional metaphors cannot die. They are guaranteed to last in their thetic I-M-0 constitution as long as the language to which they belong preserves its M-0-1 incline of generation.

By implication--and certainly not in my translation--the “ihn” deserves the Iconized capitalization of a “Him,” since it suggests the ineluctible counterforce to finite existence. There was such support for a masculine godhead from the subtle connotation of stigmata, as discussed with the hand of the grid-iron stave. Moreover, since my suggestion pertains only to an Index minus a denotative core, my readers as equal Recipients of this poem may or may not come to the same conclusion. What made me bring up this point at all is rather the didactic intent to stress for the last time that every such Qualisign change as capitalization affects some semantic nuance from the first trichotomy on, in M-O-I generation. That is why this issue surfaced while discussing the natural leaps of language, which, in capitalizing English “God,” held this Icon at bay from the other side of “dog.”

Whatever the construal in terms of content, my basic method has not deviated from previous procedures of construing the Rheme, since the structure as such is not affected. As already indicated, a backgrounded and foregrounded lyric ego surely disclosed itself as all the Icons hung connotationally together. However, Hamburger (1968, pp. 203-204; 1973, pp. 253-254) attempts a similar justification of the final masculine pronoun that Levin tried with his logical recovery. She relies on grammar in terms of a normal syntactic hierarchy by treating the “ihn” of this poem like a regular pronoun derived from one precise antecedent. First she searches for a “male person.” Finding none, she probes the masculine nouns in turn, ignoring simultaneously the left-and-right differences that affect the significance of this poem. Listing mouth, mirror, and disdain (though for some reason not the “Gitterstab”) for their equivalent masculine gender, she determines that the “Namen” in the masculine (accusative) must be the antecedent, since it is also closest in syntagma to the “ihn.” Not surprisingly, Hamburger then forms the conclusion that the text’s cohering sense she calls “object relation” remains “very uncertain” (sehr ungewiss), indeed “abstruse” or “hidden” (verborgen).

By coincidence. Hamburger’s last word in parenthesis turns out to be the same past participle that accompanied the first textual “opposition,” the concealment of the “verborgenen” mirror. To this critic, it is not “God”--in any form--but the Rheme which has not disclosed itself because it was sought with dubious criteria. Levin applied logic to linguistic gender in his recovery of a nonmasculine lion for a decidedly feminine Etna, and Hamburger similarly gives priority to syntactic rules to determine the masculine for a decidedly poetic constituent in the masculine. Her quest for syntax in what is by content and function an asyntactic setting subverts the very logic of her argument. How can the name, which so obviously belongs to the voice, equal the “him” only on the basis of the masculine? No wonder the poem stays devoid of full sense to her. Underlying the problem is her neglect to separate a lexical “lyric I,” such as the voice in the Icons presented, from a functional “lyric I” which is endemic in poetic intext, no matter what the textual denominations. Celan thus managed to “conceal” his authorial intent so well that not only the mouth got lost in the mirror but also the critic in her determination.

Not insignificantly, it is actually right after her above quest for syntactic coherence that Hamburger goes on to describe the “lyric I” as part of the three nouns, the passage quoted at the outset of my analysis. Instead, the lyric ego should be a structural criterion which transcends content-again, analogous to the Kantian transcendental ego cited before. Thus, the lyric ego is equivalent to the basic connective on which all selected contents subsist, be they present as an Iconic “I,” “him,” or whatever. Much as all the contents in their construal release the backgrounded and foregrounded lyric ego, this ego determines their very essence and function in achieving that goal. Only thematically, therefore, in view of the final enigmatic “him,” can the text be described as “open.” From the aspect of the lyric ego as transcendent connective, the structure remains teleolically closed, whether or not a period is there. The riddle of finite existence encased in “definite” barriers may not be solved beyond a modicum of hope. But the structure determining semantic content as a specific instance of thetic I-M-0 generation through an extended transference should not be a riddle to those probing a work’s nonlexical depth.

Had Hamburger discovered that fundamental “closure,” she would not have correlated a decidedly lyric “statement” with a literal “saying,” as her bipartite genre theory has it. To be sure, I also availed myself of the entire nomenclature marking syntactic divisions, yet stressed in the very first analysis that this is a descriptive means for naming decidedly Rhemic entries. Every particle of Celan’s poem has to remain an object of expression geared to a totality of expression that has been pieced together through an extended transference lodged at I hence the Interpretant of human consciousness, and not at M, where the lexicon abides, in thetic I-M-0 generation. Thus the concrete, disdainful pillar I invoked as possibly a neo Aristotelian metaphor remains lodged only at M. Be a constituent the type of “filter” the colon offered or of the “filmy” essence of that final and tantalizing pronoun, the elements, beyond their description, are equalized through their participation in a function. Thus, the very “uncertainty” or “concealment” Hamburger raised uncannily begins to assume “precise” sense as import relevant to this intext. When non-adequated “denoting” is precipitated at zero-point and then compounded into nominalized meaning, connotations are engendered through a special mode of transference, aided by the faculty of live memory.

Function and not lexical abstruseness or deviance created these “metaphors” as nominalized meanings, including the last pronoun in its extended significance as the supernatural, literally situated on the other (right?) side of empiricial immanence. Function converted each participating element as micro-component into a metonymic part of a holistic macro-structure. This relation lent sharp contours to everything--the accusative of motion, the dative lack of motion, the singular of vocatives, the interspaces of a colon, and the “t” Sinsign of imperatives, to name just a few idiosyncrasies observed in one language. In my final diagnosis. Hamburger’s quest for syntactic connections caused her to miss second stance, which recognizes the esthetic ought of a construct. When that content-insensitive imperative becomes subverted, literary language ceases to make sufficient sense in its non adequated esthetic essence--the very “sense-nexus” Hamburger ascribed to lyric statements but did not follow through logically to ultimate conclusions. Well, here it is; no “reverse” procedure made this poem cohere.

A final esthetic hermeneutic concretization then benefits from all the recursive links established, not least for that concluding pronoun in sequence which paradoxically lends “further” meaning to all the contents that preceded it. Polyphony in full concretization of what live memory has released lets the interlacing tercines ripple through their nominalized foregrounding in all their rhythmic implementation. In a last resort to conventional prosody, the meter appears dactylic, working toward a gradual diminution from two-and-a-half measures to one. This one measure descends upon the little pronoun in the closing line, as shown.

Blunt and abrupt, this foregrounded rhythm lands on the final “ihn,” adding further weight to the focalization of its import. Although the period spells the end, fulfillment is left open to doubt, as indicated. The sparse left-sided content, drawn chiefly from the inner repertoire which permitted the material contents of nouns to become linked with the verb-imperatives, has exhausted itself.

The same applies to my three exhaustive analyses, which should have demonstrated how Referent and Recipient meet through an alert superreader. To be sure, in any literary work of art there is “more” to be culled from a text--but not anything. The Icons confront the Recipient and their penetration discloses the Referent. Both interlocutory partners trade on units natural to language and accordingly on a competence wrought by the indenting power of one language, as the diatribe against my own translation was supposed to have underscored. My non-Aristotelian theory has thus been proven through five applications to texts, three of which differed, while the lyric ego was substantiated three times as athematic connective for entities that are functional metaphors. The study is thus ready to move on to the neo-Aristotelian adjunct which, as promised, offers in brief the most crucial aspects of the lexical “metaphor.”