Two years ago Sandra MacPherson wrote [1] that she's looking for “for a genuinely formalist critical practice, a little formalism that would turn one away from history without shame or apology” (p. 385). What does she mean by form? She means “nothing more—and nothing less—than the shape matter (whether a poem or a tree) takes” (p. 390).
The basic shape that literary matter takes is simple, a string. When spoken the string is an acoustic wave. When written the string is a collection of written symbols that generally take rectangular form on the page but that are read as though they were one long string – which they are. The rectangular arrangement is but a convenient way of fitting the string onto sheets of paper.
Music takes the form of a string. That’s one example for us, and poetry is often likened to music. Beads on a wire is another example – a metaphor sometimes used to characterize DNA. I suggest that Roman Jakobson’s poetic function is an abstract statement of a formal principle for things strung together in linear order, such as words.
Jakobson’s formulation of this principle is one of the most enigmatic statements in the critical literature (p. 358):
The poetic function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of selection into the axis of combination. Equivalence is promoted to the constitutive device of the sequence.
What does that mean? The sequence, of course, is our string. A bit later he says (p. 358):
Measure of sequences is a device that, outside of the poetic function, finds no application in language. Only in poetry with its regular reiteration of equivalent units is the time of the speech flow experienced, as it is — to cite another semiotic pattern — with musical time.
Almost all of his examples are from poetry. Take rhyme. Line endings occur at regular measured intervals. When similar syllables occur at specific fixed intervals, that is projection from the axis of selection (one syllable or another, one word or another) to the axis of combination. That is rhyme. Rhyme is a simple and obvious example of the poetic function. Jakobson goes on to give other, more sophisticated, examples.
But I want to move out of the domain entirely. Let me suggest that – you guessed it – ring-composition also exemplifies the poetic function. You may recall that ring-composition involves linear arrangements of this form:
A, B, C...X...C’, B, A’.
The letters indicate ‘slots’ in the sequence while the identity of the letters indicates the pattern of symmetrical matching that is characteristic of ring composition. Matching pairs are equivalent in some semantic sense and the form requires that they be deployed in a certain sequence.
That, I realize is a highly abstract paragraph. As I intend this post to be only a short note, I have no intention of filling that out [3]. My object is simply to point out that ring-composition can be seen as exemplifying Jakobson’s poetic function, thereby extending its applicable range beyond the kinds of examples Jakobson himself gave and that others typically give.
I have no reason to believe that the poetic function will account for all aspects of literary form. Just how many aspects it accounts for, I wouldn’t hazard a guess. That will require more work.
References
[1] Sandra Macpherson, A Little Formalism, ELH, Volume 82, Number 2, Summer 2015, pp. 385-405.
[2] Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Thomas Sebeok, ed., Style in Language (Cambridge, Ma.: MIT Press,1960), 350-77.
[3] See, for example, Mary Douglas, Thinking in Circles: An Essay on Ring Composition, Yale University Press, 2007. I have numerous posts on ring form, and a number of working papers: https://independent.academia.edu/BillBenzon
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