Susanne Langer - The Making of the Symbol

“La realite ne se forme que dans la memoire.”—Proust Chapter fifteen VIRTUAL MEMORY Everything actual must be transformed by imagination into something purely experiential; that is the principle of poesis. The normal means of making the poetic transformation is language; the way an event is reported gives it the appearance of being something casual or something momentous, trivial or great, good or bad, even familiar or | new. Λ statement is always a formulation of an idea, and every known fact or hypothesis or fancy takes its emotional value largely from the way it is presented and entertained. This power of words is really astounding. Their very sound can influence one’s feeling about what they are known to mean. The relation between the length of rhythmic phrases and the length of chains of thought makes thinking easy or difficult, and may make the ideas involved seem more or less profound. The vocal stresses that rhythmicize some languages, the length of vowels in others, or the tonal pitch at which words are spoken in Chinese and some less known tongues, may make one way of wording a proposition seem gayer or sadder than another. This rhythm of language is a mysterious trait that probably bespeaks biological unities of thought and feeling which are entirely unexplored as yet. The fullest exploitation of language sound and rhythm, assonance and sensuous associations, is made in lyric poetry. That is why I have considered this kind of literary composition first; not, as some people may suppose, because it is somehow superior to other kinds, the oldest or the purest or the most perfect sort of poetry. I do not think it has any higher artistic value than narrative poetry or prose. But it is the litCHAPTER

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erary form that depends most directly on pure verbal resources—the sound and evocative power of words, meter, alliteration, rhyme, and other rhythmic devices, associated images, repetitions, archaisms, and grammatical twists. It is the most obviously linguistic creation, and therefore the readiest instance of poesis. The reason why lyric poetry draws so heavily on the sound and the emotional character of language is that it has very scant materials to work with. The motif (the so-called “content”) of a lyric is usually nothing more than a thought, a vision, a mood, or a poignant emotion, which does.not offer a very robust framework for the creation of a piece of virtual history. Just as the composers of plain-song had to exploit the rhythms and accents of their Latin texts and the registers of human voices (the cultivation of the eunuch choir stems from this musical need), because they had none of the resources of meter, polyphony, keynote and modulation, nor instrumental support to work with, so the lyric poet uses every quality of language because he has neither plot nor fictitious characters nor, usually, any intellectual argument to give his poem continuity. The lure of verbal preparation and fulfillment has to do almost everything. The virtual history that a lyric poem creates is the occurrence of a living thought, the sweep of an emotion, the intense experience of a mood. This is a genuine piece of subjective history, though usually it is a single episode. Its differences from other literary products are not radical, and there is no device characteristic of lyric

composition that may not also be met in other forms. It is the frequency and importance of certain practices, rather than their exclusive use, that make lyric poetry a special type. Speech in the first person, for instance, may be found in ballads, novels, and essays; but there it is a deviation from the usual pattern, and in the lyric it is normal. Direct address to the reader may be found in romances, ballads, novels— but in the lyric such lines as: Hast thou named all the birds without a gun? or: Never seek to tell thy love Love that never can be told or: Tell me, where is fancy bred “La realite ne se forme que dans la memoire.”—Proust Chapter fifteen VIRTUAL MEMORY Everything actual must be transformed by imagination into something purely experiential; that is the principle of poesis. The normal means of making the poetic transformation is language; the way an event is reported gives it the appearance of being something casual or something momentous, trivial or great, good or bad, even familiar or new. A statement is always a formulation of an idea, and every known fact or hypothesis or fancy takes its emotional value largely from the way it is presented and entertained. This power of words is really astounding. Their very sound can influence one’s feeling about what they are known to mean. The relation between the length of rhythmic phrases and the length of chains of thought makes thinking easy or difficult, and may make the ideas involved seem more or less profound. The vocal stresses that rhythmicize some languages, the length of vowels in others, or the tonal pitch at which words are spoken in Chinese and some less known tongues, may make one way of wording a proposition seem gayer or sadder than another. This rhythm of language is a mysterious trait that probably bespeaks biological unities of thought and feeling which are entirely unexplored as yet. The fullest exploitation of language sound and rhythm, assonance and sensuous associations, is made in lyric poetry. That is why I have considered this kind of literary composition first; not, as some people may suppose, because it is somehow superior to other kinds, the oldest or the purest or the most perfect sort of poetry. I do not think it has any higher artistic value than narrative poetry or prose. But it is the litCHAPTER

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erary form that depends most directly on pure verbal resources—the sound and evocative power of words, meter, alliteration, rhyme, and other rhythmic devices, associated images, repetitions, archaisms, and grammatical twists. It is the most obviously linguistic creation, and therefore the readiest instance of poesis. The reason why lyric poetry draws so heavily on the sound and the emotional character of language is that it has very scant materials to work with. The motif (the so-called “content”) of a lyric is usually nothing more than a thought, a vision, a mood, or a poignant emotion, which does.not offer a very robust framework for the creation of a piece of virtual history. Just as the composers of plain-song had to exploit the rhythms and accents of their Latin texts and the registers of human voices (the cultivation of the eunuch choir stems from this musical need), because they had none of the resources of meter, polyphony, keynote and modulation, nor instrumental

support to work with, so the lyric poet uses every quality of language because he has neither plot nor fictitious characters nor, usually, any intellectual argument to give his poem continuity. The lure of verbal preparation and fulfillment has to do almost everything. The virtual history that a lyric poem creates is the occurrence of a living thought, the sweep of an emotion, the intense experience of a mood. This is a genuine piece of subjective history, though usually it is a single episode. Its differences from other literary products are not radical, and there is no device characteristic of lyric composition that may not also be met in other forms. It is the frequency and importance of certain practices, rather than their exclusive use, that make lyric poetry a special type. Speech in the first person, for instance, may be found in ballads, novels, and essays; but there it is a deviation from the usual pattern, and in the lyric it is normal. Direct address to the reader may be found in romances, ballads, novels— but in the lyric such lines as: Hast thou named all the birds without a gun? or: Never seek to tell thy love Love that never can be told or: Tell me, where is fancy bred hardly seem like personal apostrophe; the addict* i·. ioiuial ratlin I hit» exhortatory. In reflecting on lyric expression in the light of other literary work we shall find, presently, that neither the person speaking nor the person spoken to is an actual human being, the writer or the reader; the rhetorical form is a means of creating an impersonal subjectivity, which is the peculiar experiential illusion of a genre that creates no characters and no public events. What a poet sets out to create, rather than what he feels or wants to tell us, determines all his practices, and leads to the establishment of literary forms like the lyric, the romance, the short story, the novel. Critics who do not recognize this universal aim of every art, and every work of art, are easily misled by usages that have meanings in art quite different from their meanings in real discourse; such critics assume that a poet who says “you,” without putting the words into the mouth of a character addressing another, is speaking to the reader; and that the most notable characteristic of lyric poetry—the use of the present tense —means that the poet is uttering his own momentary feelings and thoughts. The study of tense and its literary uses is, in fact, a revealing approach to the problem of poetic creation; and English is a particularly interesting language for such a study, because it has certain subtleties of verb formation that most other languages lack, notably the “progressive” forms “I am doing,” “I was doing,” “I have been doing,” etc., as distinct from the formal conjugates: “I do,” “I did,” and the past participle tenses.1 In the use of verb forms one finds devices that disclose the real nature of the literary dimension in which the image of life is created; the present tense proves to be a far more subtle instrument than either grammarians or rhetoricians generally realize, and to have quite other uses than the characterization of present acts and facts. As soon as we pass from the intensive, small form of the lyric to works of greater compass, we encounter a new dominant element—narrative. This element is not unknown in lyric verse, but it is incidental there;

*On the other hand, it lacks independent forms corresponding to die French “imperfect” and “definite” past tenses. Our “present perfect” corresponds to the French “past indefinite,” but the distinction between “j’etais” and “je fus” we cannot make without circumlocution. • nwitrnif Virtual Memory Mir dwelt among the untrodden way», or:

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Λ sunny shaft did I behold, From sky to earth it slanted, are narrative lines, but they only serve to introduce a situation, an image, or an object for reflection and emotion. When, however, narrative is treated as the central motif of a composition, a new factor is introduced, which is story interest. This changes the entire form of thought which governs the work. A course of impersonal happenings is a strong framework for the making of a poetic illusion; it tends to become the ground plan, or “plot,” of the entire piece, affecting and dominating every other means of literary creation. Personal address, for instance, which is usually a rhetorical device in lyric writing, becomes an action in the story, as one fictitious person addresses himself to another. Imagery, which is often the chief substance of a lyric poem, and may appear to be generated by free association, each vision evoking another,2 is no longer paramount in narrative poetry, and no longer free; it has to serve the needs of the action. If it fails to do so, the work loses the organic character that makes poetry seem like a piece of nature though everything in it be physically impossible. Narrative is a major organizing device. It is as important to literature as representation to painting and sculpture; that is to say, it is not the essence of literature, for (like representation in plastic art) it is not indispensable, but it is the structural basis on which most works are designed. It underlies the “Great Tradition” of poetic art in our culture, much as representation underlies the “Great Tradition” in sculptural and pictorial art. The profound influence of narrative on any literary work into which it enters is most pervasively shown in the change of tense from the present, which is normal for lyric expression, to the perfect, the characteristic tense of story. Since most literature is narration, the perfect tense is by far the most common verb form in fiction. It is so accepted that it does not seem to require explanation, until we reflect on the fact that daydream—often regarded as the source of all literary invention—is usually 2

Shelley built the first three sections of his “Ode to the West Wind” by means of such dreamlike concatenation of images. 101 The Maklnx of the Symbol formulated In Hie pieiienl leiise. Daydream U\ a |HI»I-.:I 173184): “The enigmatic depths of memory have never been plumbed and exhaustively searched by any man. . . . Each life-span organizes itself into a particular nexus of events which we can recall and in which we may dwell. . . . These worlds of experience and memory are our permanent possessions. . . . They have the virtue of finished products ... a completeness which the present does not have.” e

See Symbolism: Its Meaning and Effect, especially pp. 58-59.

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those relative dates. Before we know any names for the days of the week, for the months, for the times of day, even very recent memories have no order. Children’s experiences either still belong to the specious present -like the bump that still hurts-or they have become recollections, and belong to an essentially timeless past. Even our personal history as we conceive it is, then, a construction out of our own memories, reports of other people’s memories, and assumptions of causal relations among the items thus furnished. It is by no means all recollection. We are not really aware of our existence as continuous. Sometimes the memories of different places and activities in which we have found ourselves are so incongruous that we have to recall and arrange a series of intervening events before we really feel convinced that two such diverse situations belong to the same life. Especially when memory is very vivid it has no continuity. The deeply impressed incident seems to rise out of the past all alone, sometimes with such extraordinary detail that it suggests an experience just passed, scarcely modified at all by oblivion as yet; then, although the remembered event may be of old standing, it seems “as though it had been yesterday.” Recent memories, on the other hand, may exist as mere awareness of facts, without emotional tone, without any detail, and even become confused with imagined events, so we can truly say: “I remember that it happened, but I cannot clearly recall how it was.” The primary illusion created by poesis is a history entirely “experienced”; and in literature proper (as distinct from drama, film, or pictured story) this virtual history is in the mode typified by memory. Its form is the closed, completed form that in actuality only memories have. Literature need not be made out of the author’s memories (though it may be), nor does it necessarily present events explicitly as somebody’s memories (though it may do so), but the mode in which events appear is the mode of completed experience, i.e. of the past. This explains why the normal tense of literary narration is the past tense. The verb form -a purely linguistic factor-effects the “literary projection” by creating a virtual past. This past, however, which literature engenders, has a unity that actual personal history does not have; for our accepted past is not entirely experiential. Like our apprehensions of space, of time, and of the forces

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that control us, our sense of the past derives from memories mixed with extraneous elements, assumptions and speculations, that present life as a chain of events rather than as a single progressive action. In fiction, however, there is nothing but virtual memory; the illusion of life must be experiential through and through. The poetically created world is not limited to the impressions of one individual, but it is limited to impressions. All its connections are lived connections, i.e. motivations, all causes and effects operate only as the motives for expectation, fulfillment, frustration, surprise. Natural events are simply the molds in which human experiences are cast; their occurrence has to be inherent in the story which is a total action. Consider, for instance, the perfectly natural storm in the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens: it is a psychologically motivated “next step” after his defiant sailing from Norway because the inhospitable Norwegians have taunted him. Nor is it introduced as mere chance, but one of his men predicts it: I saw the new moon late yestreen Wi’ the auld moon in her arm; And if we gang to sea, master, I fear we’ll come to harm. In actual life we often make such reasonable predictions; and if the expected event does not occur, the prediction is soon forgotten. But in poetry nothing is forgotten except by persons in the story. If the reader forgets, he will be reminded (assuming that the story is well told); for the poet’s conception includes nothing that does not serve the narrative, which is the substance of his creation. Reflections, descriptions, and gemlike lines, and even characters are just parts of the tale, or what is told. Narrative, then, has always the semblance of memory, more purely than actual history, even the personal history that we treat as our own memory; for poetry is created, and if its events be borrowed from the artist’s memory, he must replace every non-experiential factor in his actual “past” by elements of purely experiential character, just as a painter substitutes purely visual appearances for the non-visual factors in ordinary space perception. The poet makes a semblance of events that is experience-like, but universally accessible; an objectified, depersonalized “memory,” entirely homogeneous, no matter how much is explicit and how much implicit.

n The Making of the Symbol The contrast between the chaotic advance of the actual present and the surveyable form of remembered life has been remarked by several artist-philosophers, notably Marcel Proust, who maintained that what we call “reality” is a product of memory rather than the object of direct encounter; the present is “real” only by being the stuff of later memories. It was a peculiarity of Proust’s genius to work always with a poetic core that was a spontaneous and perfect formulation of something in actual memory. This intense, emotionally charged recollection, completely articulate in every detail, yet as sudden and immediate as a present experience, not only was the catalyst that activated his imagination, but also constituted his ideal of poetic illusion, to be achieved by the most conscious and subtle kind of story-telling. PART

Literature, in the strict sense, creates the illusion of life in the mode of a virtual past. “Poesis” is a wider term than literature, because there are other modes of poetic imagination than the presentation of life through language alone. Drama and its variants (pantomime, marionettes) and moving picture are essentially poetic arts in other modes that I shall discuss in a subsequent chapter; they employ words in special ways, and sometimes even dispense with them altogether. The illusion they create is

virtual life, an experiential history, but not in the mnemonic projection, not a virtual Past. That mode is peculiar to “literature” in the narrow sense of verbal art—works of imagination to be heard or read. The perfect tense is a natural device for making and sustaining an illusion of finished fact. What challenges the theorist is, rather, the occasional use of the present tense in narrative, and especially its normal use in lyric poetry. It is the present and the “present perfect” that require explanation. The role of these forms in the creation of virtual history sheds some interesting lights on the nature of memory; for memory has many aspects which psychologists have not discovered, but of which the poet, who constructs its image, is aware. But a poet is not a psychologist; his knowledge is not explicit but implicit in his conception of the image. The critic, analyzing the way the “remembrance” of the virtual Past is made, is the person who is in a position to discover the intricacies of real memory through the artistic devices that achieve its semblance. There are certain ordinary, non-literary uses of the present tense that CHAPTER

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indicate its possibilities for creative purposes. Its official use is, of course, to designate action occurring at the time of speaking. Grammarians usually cite the present indicative of a verb first, and in teaching a language we teach it first, as though-it were the most necessary, most useful form. Actually, it is little used in English; we rarely say “I go,” “I wait,” etc., but generally substitute the “progressive” form. The reason is that the pure present refers to a momentary performance, the participle with “I am” to a sustained one, an active state; an immediate action taking place is usually apparent, and does not need to be mentioned;7 so, when we talk about present acts, we normally do so to explain our immediate behavior as part of a protracted action, and therefore use the “progressive” present: “I am going home.” “I am waiting for a bus.” The most important use of the pure present is in the statement of general facts such as the laws of nature, or of relations among abstract concepts, like the propositions in an algebra book. Science and philosophy and criticism are normally written in the pure present; “24-2 = 4” is read “two plus two equals four,” not “equaled” or “is equaling” or “will equal.” The present tense in such a context is the tense of timelessness.8 It is used where time is irrelevant—where abstract entities are related, general truths expressed, or mere ideas associated apart from any actual situation, as in reverie. Perhaps it is this “timeless” character of the pure present that makes grammarians adduce it first of all the tenses; it is like a modulus of verb conjugation—a form somewhere between the infinitive, which merely names an action without asserting its occurrence at all, and the tenses which not only indicate but date it. In literature, the pure present can create the impression of an act, yet suspend the sense of time in regard to it. This explains its normal use in lyric poetry. Many critics, assuming that the present tense must refer to the present moment, have been led by this supposed grammatical evidence to believe that lyric poetry is always the utterance of the poet’s 7

Except for the frequent statements—“I think . . .,” “I don’t believe . . .,” “I feel . . .”; subjective acts being unapparent by themselves. 8

In the literature of epistemology, the observation of this “timeless” use of the present may be found in C. I. Lewis’ Analysis of Meaning and Valuation, p. 51.

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own beliefs and actual feelings.9 But I maintain that lyric composition is art, and therefore creative; and the use of its characteristic tense must serve the creation that is peculiar to this kind of poetry. As already said earlier in this chapter, the semblance most frequently created in a lyric is that of a very limited event, a concentrated bit of history-the thinking of an emotional thought, a feeling about someone or something. The framework is one of occurrent ideas, not external happenings; contemplation is the substance of the lyric, which motivates and even contains the emotion presented. And the natural tense of contemplation is the present. Ideas are timeless; in a lyric they are not said to have occurred, but are virtually occurring; the relations that hold them together are timeless, too. The whole creation in a lyric is an awareness of a subjective experience, and the tense of subjectivity is the “timeless” present. This kind of poetry has the “closed” character of the mnemonic mode, without the historical fixity that outward events bestow on real memories; it is in the “historical projection” without chronology. Lyric writing is a specialized technique that constructs an impression or an idea as something experienced, in a sort of eternal present; in this way, instead of offering abstract propositions into which time and causation simply do not enter, the lyric poet creates a sense of concrete reality from which the time element has been canceled out, leaving a Platonic sense of “eternity.” This timelessness is really one of the striking traits of many memories. The recollection of moods and attitudes, like spring fever or pen-siveness, normally has no reference to specific occasions, yet such an experience is once and for all familiar, and rises in recollection with the vividness of something very recent. Often the remotest childhood moods come back suddenly with a completely unchronological freshness; yet 9

See, for example, D. G. Brinton’s article, “The Epilogues of Browning: Their Artistic Significance,” in Poet Lore, IV (1892), which lists the following conclusions : “(1) That Browning uniformly treats the epilogue as an element, not of dramatic, but of lyric poetry. “(2) That with him it approaches the form of the soliloquy, and is intended to bring about a direct and personal relation between himself and his reader. “(3) That his epilogues are the only portions of his writings in which he avowedly drops the dramatic turn of his genius and expresses his own sentiments as a man.” CHAPTER

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