A response to Gaston Bachelard’s Poetics of Reverie (”Word Reverie”) and Annie Finch’s Lofty Dogmas.
| English |
German |
Slovene |
French |
Welsh |
| Time |
die Zeit (f) |
cas (m) |
temps (m) |
amser (m) |
| Cash/Money |
das Geld (n) |
denar (m) |
monnaie (f) |
arian (m) |
| Patience |
die Geduld (f) |
potrpeztjivost (?) (f) |
patience (f) |
amynedd (m) |
| Strength |
die Stärke (f) |
moc (f) |
force (f) |
cryfder (m) |
“… but I now leave my cetological system standing thus unfinished, even as the great Cathedral of Cologne was left, with the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower. For small erections may be finished by their first architects; grand ones, true ones, ever leave the copestone to posterity. God keep me from ever completing anything. This whole book is but a draught – nay, but a draught of a draught. Oh, Time, Strength, Cash, and Patience!â€
— Herman Melville, Moby-Dick
One’s first, perhaps natural, reaction upon reading Bachelard’s essay on Word Reverie, is to feel the tremendous sense of loss at the “asexuality†of the English language that has come down to us. There is simply no way to argue convincingly that even the most sensitive among us think of the gender of the words we use on a conscious level, although the table above is meant to show how one particularly sensitive early writer of American English may have been hinting at the sex of some of his words as he mingled them together at the end of this passage. I can of course prove nothing; to take this any further would be to get into arguing an inherent sex implied in the words themselves in English. I can say that the word “time†is derived from the Indo-European root “da,†also “dai†– to divide. This became “tid†in Old English, which led to “tide,†“tidings,†eventually “tima†– “time.†It would perhaps take a linguist to speculate beyond this.
Further reflection begs the question of whether English has not been released from the strict gender roles assigned to nouns in other tongues. Having been raised on the feminine concept of the “fountain,†for example, Bachelard seems unwilling/able to fully embrace the maleness of the German “Brunnen.†As an English speaker with no bias either way, I am able to appreciate the hermaphroditic qualities of both word-images superimposed upon each other. There is the soft femininity of the water falling down, but the very maleness of its spurting up. Best of both worlds, word-wise.
Later in the essay, when he quotes St.-Pierre as saying, “It would be curious to investigate whether masculine names have been given by women and feminine names by men to things which serve more particularly the usages of each sex…†this strikes me as somewhat naïve, if not disingenuous. It imagines a utopian world where men and women share the naming of things equally, with no linguistic chips on their shoulders, and a sort of agreement on what constitutes the masculine and feminine principle. Clearly, no such equality or agreement can be discerned in any of the written history of humankind available to us.
To put it bluntly, one suspects that men were ever in charge of the naming of things. After all, it is written in Genesis 2:19: “And out of the ground the Lord God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.†This was before Eve had even arrived on the scene; later it says (v. 23) that Adam named her (“Woman, because she was taken out of Manâ€). It is doubtful, furthermore, whether the post-feminine theory female would even agree with the principle that seems to go unexamined in this essay, which assigns an almost compliant softness to feminine words, a penetrant stolidity to male ones. This might be quibbling, as one certainly imagines the possibility of agreeing on some principles when it comes to gender difference, but it warrants mentioning.
Perhaps more to the point is whether the act of naming things itself is a masculine or feminine activity. Gertrude Stein called poetry the naming of things. We have already seen it assigned to Adam, as it was in Greek Mythology to Orpheus/Apollo. Certainly it seems on the surface to be a rational, almost aggressive act. Yet true poetry does not strike me as being rational or aggressive. I am reminded again of Rilke:
| “Wendung†|
(Turning) trans. Edward Snow |
Werk des Gesichts ist getan,
tue nun Herz-Werk
an den Bildern in dir, jenen gefangenen, denn du
überwältigtest sie: aber nun kennst du sie nicht.
Siehe, innerer Mann, dein inneres Mädchen,
dieses errungene aus
tausend Naturen, dieses
erst nur errungene, nie
noch geliebte Geschöpf.
|
Work of the eyes is done,
begin heartwork now
on those images in you, those captive ones;
for you conquered them: but now you don’t know them.
Behold, inner man, your inner woman,
she who was won
from a thousand natures, she
the till now only won,
as yet never loved creation.
|
I notice reading this now that in German it says “Mädchen,†perhaps more appropriately translated as “girl†or “maid.†But this only further illustrates my point – that poetry is in turn masculine and feminine or sometimes both at once. As Pound (?) proposed the poet as centaur, a thinking mind over quickly moving rhythmic feet, one might propose the poet as hermaphrodite, or Tiresias at the very least, switching genders as one goes through life, growing, changing, open to all.
To think about how this works, one would have to pay careful attention to the process of how one goes about naming or making a poem. What goes through the mind while writing, what makes one choose one word over another? Is it closer to Bachelard’s feminine “reverie,†or the masculinity of Williams’ “dream enacted.†I think again too of Keats, whose “gender†is so actively problematic as one moves through his poems, or feels him moving through them. This is why the Finch pronouncement “I loved Keats, but I couldn’t put my own lyric voice in that position with a straight face. As a woman, I knew too much about how it feels to be something – nightengale, urn, woman – that is an object in other people’s eyes†strikes me as reductive on several levels. Although there is no argument here that women have not experienced “objectification†to a much higher degree than men have, this statement discounts Keats’ ability to move beyond gender and identify or empathize with (“loveâ€) the thing in a way similar to what Rilke proposes in the poem quoted above. It also assumes an objectification in the poems alluded to (Ode to a Nightengale and Ode on a Grecian Urn) that I don’t believe a careful reader will find. It is precisely because Keats is unable to reduce or “pin down†either entity (art in “Urn†and nature in “Nightengaleâ€) to an objectified, defined thing that the poems are so open and interesting to us. Clearly there is a great deal of fetishization (of women and objects, even words and colors) in the early poetry of Keats, and the impulse to write about the nightengale and the urn may have arisen from an artistic-literary fetish, but as he matured, and especially in these poems, the whole question of male and female is complicated in tremendously powerful ways.
Let’s not forget that “Nightengale†ends with the question “do I wake or sleep?†and that “Urn†begins with a series of questions that the urn refuses to answer, and leaves us with the incredibly enigmatic statement “Beauty is truth, truth beauty – that is all/Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.â€
Tags: Form and Theory by dhadbawnik
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