Parataxis as Praxis
Posted on May 25, 2007
Filed Under Language, Philosophy, Poetry |
Does parataxis exist in a text if the whole text’s tactic is paratactic? Doesn’t parataxis depend on a context of syntaxis? Is the wholly paratactic poem poem possible & if it is, what is its context? The whole language? Those questions occurred to me while reading the most recent of Ray Davis’s accounts of his development as a reader of poetry. And in what way is parataxis not a “subjective lyric stance”? There is a problem of foregrounding here I don’t quite get, a field effect to understand. (There is also a spirited defense of Lowell & Wright to be made — perhaps it is only generational, I’ll be 56 next week — but that’s another branch of the American tree.)
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8 Responses to “Parataxis as Praxis”
Those are good questions. (It might be amusing to review some LangPo with a parody of Silliman’s “Sunset Debris“, another of his catchy forms. Probablys someone’s already done it.) I’ll have a go at them:
“Does parataxis exist in a text if the whole text’s tactic is paratactic?”
It stops being startling, certainly. At which point it starts being perceived by me as its own thing, and by some other readers tiresome repetition of a failed rhetorical effect. Possible analogies: “Dissonance is for spice; that isn’t music, it’s noise,” or “Violence initiates the tragedy; that isn’t drama, it’s exploitation.” But I don’t know any other way of describing the way the sentences go together.
“Doesn’t parataxis depend on a context of syntaxis?”
Same answer, I guess.
“Is the wholly paratactic poem poem possible & if it is, what is its context? The whole language?”
Well, I’d prefer to avoid an a journalistically “autobiographical” approach to criticism, but I indulged this time in the hope of showing how it became possible for a particular reader in a particular personal context. No literary experience takes place floating in a context definable only as “the whole language”. Silliman’s big project is called “The Alphabet”, not “The Dictionary Galactica”.
“And in what way is parataxis not a ’subjective lyric stance’?”
But it is! That’s what I meant the piece to be about. What I wrote is that Silliman’s anthology avoided anything I recognized as “well-established subjective lyric stances.” I’ll see if I can come up with a way of sharpening that point.
If I incite a defense of Lowell and Wright, I’ll read it with pleasure — as I still read Wright. (Lowell just doesn’t do much for me, I’m afraid.)
“… that’s another branch of the American tree.”
“All too American.” I’m 48, myself, by the way, which I guess is enough of a difference to make you a hippie and me a punk. We can agree on Billie Holiday, though, right?
Ray, yes on Billie Holiday, absolutely. And I have spent a lot of time over the last decade trying to find a way past the confessional lyric in my own work, which is why your series of posts grabbed & shook me. I’m going to come back to this.
Each sentence of a Silliman poem, for example, is completely syntactical. The parataxis occurs at the discursive level, in the space between the sentences. In other words, they don’t add up to a paragraph of discourse.
Now obviously we still try to connect the sentences together in some way. Rhythmically, thematically. So the ghost of a hypotactic structure is there in the paragraph. There’s a tension maintained between the desire of the reader to make connections and the refusal of the text to yield a structure of relations between the sentences. People who say it’s boring simply give up, saying that there isn’t enough glue holding things together so why bother. People who are interested in this kind of writing like the play between the absence of hypotaxis and the connections they are able to make.
Jonathan, I may be one of the people who say it’s boring — I’m not sure — but what I want to know as a reader before I give up reading is the value of the text’s refusal. What’s in it for me? Is the value entirely aesthetic? It often feels like mere aestheticism.
Who put the mere into aestheticism? You can’t know in advance what the payoff’s going to be, that’s true.
Jonathan, I did. I put it there. I’m trying to explain why in a new entry (above).
[...] Canadian border. Gardeners, even poor ones, are interested in the weather. As I was watering, I was thinking about parataxis again. My neck is killing me because I pushed the mower around the lower part of the yard for an [...]
Writing from a moving train, Bruce Andrew’s aestheticim maybe is one of ugliness: a pleasure to be gained from his ‘filthy’ arrangements of images of physical aging, sexual activity and consumerism in “I don’t have enough paper so shut up”. But I am bored by the whole thing and I always was. What titillated me as a reader was the few lines that stood out, the fact that such against the grain writing could find its way into published form, accompanied by a sea of theoretical justification. The avant-garde has its place, providing a necessary re-imagining of literary forms and their socio-political import. Such texts are inevitally going to bore the average reader (one, usually a non- practioner, who has not made the avant-garde their mainstream) and as such the solidification of any literary experiment, such as the paratactical sequencing employed by Andrews, into an an artistic form becomes a bit tedious after a few decades.