Retallack #3: "How to Do Things with Words"

I love the "continual delivery of fresh forms of nonsense" here. Recombining words and letters to make the logical illogical. Or to show how the logical often becomes illogical in language. 

A recent family experience comes to mind. One person in the family tells the experience one way. The other tells it another ways. These subjective narratives might overlap somewhat, but also have quite different meanings, depending on the emphasis given to certain events, words or intents. 

Or perhaps put this way: there are not just unreliable narrators. Language itself is the unreliable narrator. What a compliment it would be to be believed, Retallack and Austen allude. But Retallack throws in the possibility that understanding someone else's belief or reality through language is never easy.

Perhaps part of why Retallack chose Austen as a point of comparison to Austin (aside from the soundalike nature, soundalike or phonetics being another way that langauge may not mean itself exactly nor precisely, or be precise in one way but highly inexact in another way), well part of the reason I think Retallack may be alluding to Austen is that Austen's writing contains wit and humour, repartee. It also contains many misunderstandings between people/characters.

Wit is important when it comes to making words mean something different than they might when used algebraically/mathematically. Wit might involve taking a serious idea and making it light/silly, just by changing a very few words or sounds within that idea. Wit or humor can take the heavy and make it lightly absurd. Bring the nonsense - it's so important. Wit, or at least verbal wit, also often has to do with a strong command of language and idiom. In this poem, Retallack takes a hammer and chisel to some words here and there, breaking parts of words off from their suffixes, leaving us hanging, or leaving the word itself hanging, perhaps. Or the poet leaving herself hanging, because there is risk in not completing the sentence, not completing the thought, in overtly witholding, in making no sense. (Women in particular being regarded, so often, as nonsensical/emotional, it can be hard for a "serious poet" to overtly take on that role at times.)

Including Austen points to the fact that there are ways to be serious by being unserious. And vice versa. It's not necessary for thoughts about language to be so dryly expressed all the time, as in many textbooks and theoretical treatise and academic articles. 

 

It may not be so bad to take JR at her word - to open she tells us the piece will have the subject “Excuses,” and that’s all she’ll say about it, at least by way of “treatment.”

I think I can take “treat” to mean the semantically and grammatically coherent, argument-making formal register academic-ese of the portions “above the bar” on each page. This above-the-bar:formal, below-the-bar:something-else format is consistent throughout the poem… although by the end she tells us (but we should have realized by then) that these formal appearing statements above the bar may not be what they look or sound like ("whether many apparent pseudo-statements really set out to be 'statements'at all." pg.92)…hinting at the possibility for things made out of language to … what? Be something other than itself? Is this one of the ways language can “do things?” And of course this referring to itself business means we’re doing metapoetry but no surprise there.

To find out more I then look below the bar. I think JR continues to be kind enough to guide us at least in the beginning (pg.87). We’re interested in the relationship between passions and truth (but we don’t want the language from pop fiction or tv). We’re interested in the extent to which one or the other or both of these things could be a) made “more itself (whetted)” (i.e., closer to “true” passion, closer to “truer” truth - here’s the collapse into recursion?fractals? re truth already), or b) tethered or grounded in something… which would have to be something like truth. Lol.

There’s a warning about what’s about to happen, i.e. collision of intentiononintention, read by JR as intention on non-intention, and then it happens. Stuff starts crashing into each other, though I think JR might be trying to tell us about it, i.e. sentences of the form p is true or what interests me is x will have abrupt intersections… Some other things I notice in these “below the bar” sections:”

• The first paragraph is all JR narrating; where there’s a second paragraph (coincidentally all on right-side pages) quotations from Jane Austen enter the mix. Perhaps highlighting how it’s not just our own language that collides in our thoughts, language from others gets in there as well.
• At times grammatical continuity is challenged beyond the “collisions” of intentional and non-intentional thought (although which ones were intentional?). See “whether or whether this or this is” in place of what I think is “whether this is” on pg.90 and later in the same page, “that one/might/in fact.” This could be an observation on the arbitrariness of our rules and processes for parsing meaning from signs.
• Speaking of signs… that stuff is wingdings! Translated with spaces maintained (Interesting how x and y are isolated… I don’t know anything about formal linguistics (J.L. Austin) but I imagine in discussing what language can do, some sort of algebra would come in handy): 

• She just switched the words around! … turns out that’s a thing JR can do with words. JR can also take synonyms and posit a difference given an arbitrary context ("can be, and should be, distinguished" pg.90) and that will set people off examining the properties of measurement and rulers and bananas, armed with notions of identity and so on… hey how do you know she didn’t impale six bananas on the ruler and found there wasn’t enough ruler to impale a seventh?
• “Death I think she said is no parenthesis” seems to be a paraphrase of the last line of Cummings’s poem “Since feeling is first.”

There’s so much more in this poem to notice but tomorrow is a work day and I do have some thoughts about the poem as a whole. Always cautious to “interpret” a poem but I nonetheless think that there is a coherent project that is “hidden” in here. I think this poem is *about* her divorce.

It could be that I’m privileging the content that was deepest “hidden” in the signs; it could be that “Excuses,” “passion,” “truth,” and the stumbling diction in the wingdings (along with what feels to me to be a search for more precise meaning via “extablish,” “unmarried”) come together with such astonishing coherence, “since feeling is first”… It could be that I’m enchanted by the idea of JR attempting an understanding of her experience, and immediately being troubled by the trouble with language - familiar formulations are ineffectual, yet when she tries to get language to mean better she finds that the signs are arbitrary and protean, their meanings are slippery and ungrounded. Formal rational argumentation fails; stream-of-consciousness style inquiry into the nature of language also fails, constantly interrupted by herself and others… It’s not until I recognized the truthfulness and candor in presenting these failures as they are that I was able to realize that something had been done with words. What couldn't be said had been preserved and communicated. The “excuse” (for not speaking of her unmarriage directly) was a non-excuse because that way was a dead end to begin with.

Thank you, Richard, That was extremely helpful!

Can this refer to the differences in meaning words can have? How many bananas would you need to measure Trump, Putin, and other self-perceived rulers? A slippery slope.

I'm doing this as a test. I just tried to reply to a particular post and my post did not post, so I'm trying to this to see what happens.