Not so long ago I argued that Jakobson’s poetic function could be extended beyond
the examples he gave, which came from poetry, to other formal features, such as
ring composition [1]. I now want to suggest that it is a computational principle
as well. What I mean by computation [2]? That’s always a question in these
discussions, isn’t it?
When Alan Turing formalized the idea of computation he did
so with the notion of a so-called Turing Machine [3]: “The machine operates on
an infinite memory tape divided into discrete cells.
The machine positions its head over a cell and ‘reads’
(scans) the symbol there.” There’s more to it than that, but that’s all we
need here. It’s that tape that interests me, the one with discrete cells, each
containing a symbol. Turing defined computation as an operation on the contents
of those cells. Just what kind of symbols we’re dealing with is irrelevant as
long as the basic rules governing their use are well-specified. The symbols
might be numerals and mathematical operators, but they might also be the words
and punctuation marks of a written language.
Linguists frequently refer to strings; an utterance is a
string of phonemes, or morphemes, or words, depending on what you’re interested
in. Of course it doesn’t have to be an utterance; the string can consist of a
written text. What’s important is that it’s a string.
Well, Jakobson’s poetic function places restrictions on the
arrangement of words on the string, restrictions independent of those made by
ordinary syntax. Here’s Jakobson’s definition [4]:
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.
The sequence, of
course, is our string. As for the rest of it, that’s a bit obscure. But it’s
easy to see how things like meter and rhyme impose restrictions on the
composition of strings. Jakobson has other examples and I give a more careful
account of the restriction in my post, along with the example of ring
composition [1]. Moreover, in a working paper on ring composition, I have
already pointed out how the seven rules Mary Douglas gave for characterizing
ring composition can be given a computational interpretation [5, pp. 39-42].
* * * * *
I want to shift our attention a bit, to description. Sandra MacPherson has written [6] looking for an
account of literary form in which form means “nothing more—and nothing
less—than the shape matter (whether a poem or a tree) takes” (p. 390). If
literary texts, indeed all texts, take the physical form of a string, then
what’s there to describe? Obviously, the arrangement
of items on the string. That’s what we’re doing when, for example, we specify
the requirements of a verse form, X lines, each having form M, with such and
such a rhyme scheme. The same for ring-composition. It seems that we’re back at
Jakobson’s poetic function.
Which is fine. But the ordinary business of punctuation
marks and grammatical function words (conjunctions, prepositions, adverbs, determiners,
articles) also follows conventions of placement on the string. What I want to
emphasize, though, is that those arrangements are there for and make sense in
terms of the “device” that “processes” the string. That device, of course, is
the human mind. (Let’s not worry about the relation between mind and brain, not
here and now.) If we understood the workings of the mind, then it would be easy
to characterize those features of strings that constitute literary form.
Alas, we don’t (understood the workings of the mind). Characterizing
those features of strings that constitute literary form is sometimes fairly
easy (verse), but often not so easy (e.g. ring composition). Yet it’s not
rocket science either. It can be done. Doing it requires a broad and diffuse
awareness of texts of the sort that comes from experience, reading a lot and
thinking closely about them. Such experience isn’t sufficient to the task – you
also need to believe that form is there and be acquainted with good examples of
formal analysis – but it is necessary. There’s no substitute for it.
If literary form exists to serve the operations of the human
mind, then it follows that whatever we
learn about such form will give us clues about those operations. And that’s
why the study of literary form should be of interest, not only to literary
critics (who, alas, could care less, even if they’re formalists of this or that
persuasion) but to students of the mind
in general regardless of academic discipline.
Literary form, and aesthetic form in general, reveals the
capacities of the mind when it moves in the world unconstrained by the necessities of (immediate) survival. Form is
what WE bring to the world. It is US.
THAT is why the description of form is important. That’s one
thing that literary critics can give to the general investigation of human
behavior. As John Barth has said, the key to the treasure is the treasure.
[1] Jakobson’s Poetic Function and Literary Form, New Savanna,
blog post, September 7, 2017: http://new-savanna.blogspot.com/2017/09/jakobsons-poetic-function-and-literary.html
[2] I have argued at some length that literary form is
computational: Literary Morphology: Nine Propositions in a Naturalist Theory of
Form. PsyArt: An Online Journal for the
Psychological Study of the Arts, August 2006, Article 060608. https://www.academia.edu/235110/Literary_Morphology_Nine_Propositions_in_a_Naturalist_Theory_of_Form
[3] Turing machine, Wikipedia, accessed Sept. 19, 2017: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine
[4] Roman Jakobson, “Linguistics and Poetics,” in Thomas
Sebeok, ed., Style in Language (Cambridge,
Ma.: MIT Press,1960), 350-77.
[5] Ring Composition: Some Notes on a Particular Literary
Morphology, Working Paper, September 28, 2014, 70 pp.
[6] Sandra Macpherson, A Little Formalism, ELH,
Volume 82, Number 2, Summer 2015, pp. 385-405.
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