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Topic: Zukofsky
Abigail Lang Universite Paris 7
The Remembering Words or < How Zukofsky Used Words > (Outline).
In ?For Wallace Stevens?, Zukofsky writes: ?just read the words?. (Prepositions, 24).
What?s in a word? The word is clearly the unit, the atom of Zukofsky?s. I will begin by looking at the word in isolation, then at the word in context, at the effect of the context on the single word.
How to read?
My hypothesis is that Zukofsky developed a fetishistic view of words, an implicit belief in their ability to accumulate meaning, to record past uses, to stand synecdochically for their initial context, whether logical or material. Method: one way to learn how to read Zukofsky is to watch him read ?read and quote.
I. THE WORD IN ISOLATION.
1. The word as arrangement.
One is brought back to the entirety of the single word, which is in itself a relation, an implied metaphor, an arrangement and a harmony. (Poetry, n?37, 279).
2. For or against connotation?
Vagueness of the term and ineffectiveness of the denotation/connotation paradigm as thinking tool. Zukofsky against ?mushiness? but in favor of the full (dictionary) meaning.
3. All the meanings of the word.
The word ?bay? [...] should convey something of all the meanings of the word ?bay? : red-brown, the laurel, the laurel wreath, a bay horse, a deep bark or cry, a window-bay, a large space in a barn for storage as of hay or fodder, the state of being kept at a standstill, but more specifically two meanings that seemed to include all the others, they are, an arm of the sea and a recess of low land between hills. (CSP, 103).
A materialistic definition of the word.
4. Conveying the full meaning.
Achieved through syntax: words kept in a certain isolation through the willful confusion or indetermination of the parts of speech. Reading ?A?-9, ?A?-22&23 and 80 Flowers aloud.. Syntactical indeterminacy and semantic completeness reinforce each other.
5. Comparing occurrences.
How does Zukofsky read Shakespeare? Tracking and tagging recurrences; reading as with an index.
6. Connecting recurrences (Gezera shava and index).
There is a Talmudic way of reading that says :
Take two verses in the Bible, V1 and V2, located at any point of the text, for instance, the first in Genesis, the second in Isaiah. These two verses contain the same word and we have a certain knowledge about that word in V1. The gezera chava allows one to transfer that knowledge from V1 to V2 irrespective of any context or likelihood. Only the written connections count [...] the specialist of the Midrash consider this practice as the generalization of another interpretative operation, the most fundamental, the semoukha: two juxtaposed verses, whatever the heterogeneity of their apparent signification, possess a logical link and can be read as a single utterance [...] This favors the contiguities, the connections of the text and thus give the Talmud its style. (G. Haddad, Manger le livre (Eating the book), 209-210)
The literal presence of the word counts over and above context. And words are seen as capable of transferring knowledge, as condenser and conveyors of knowledge.
Effects of the index: isolation of words, notion reverberates, special emphasis through selection and number of occurrences, invitation to read occurrences as a series, to compare contexts.
II. THE WORD IN CONTEXT.
Five phenomena enable the emergence of the memory of words.
1 One-word or invisible quote.
Quotes reduced to a single word, without quotation marks and imperceptible as such.
2. Brilliant and memorable uses.
In chapter 4 of Pound?s ABC of Reading Zukofsky would have read:
? the good writer chooses his words for their ?meaning?, but that meaning is not a set, cut-off thing like the move of knight or pawn on a chess-board. It comes up with roots, associations, with how and where the word is familiarly used, or where it has been used brilliantly or memorably. (36)
Zukofsky will take this process further to include the non-brilliant and non-memorable uses.
3. The material context.
The context of a word: to where it was found, that is heard or more often, read, and then copied out to be eventually quoted. a logical or intellectual entirety such as sentence, line or paragraph, but also a material or physical entirety such as a page (material connotation). Ex: Thanks to the Dictionary. When uprooted, the word tears off with it some of its soil, drags with it associations from a material context:.
4. Quoting the dictionary..
To write is always to quote, if only the dictionary.
The fifth practice enabling the emergence of the remembering words phenomenon is the synecdochic mode. Zukofsky?s use of synecdoche goes back to the title of ?Poem beginning ?The??.
5. The one-word quote as fetish.
The first canzone of ?A?-9 begins: ?An impulse to action sings of a semblance? (106) First Half of < A >-9, indicates that the word semblance is a quote from the Capital, taken from the very sentence in which Marx defines fetishism: < We are concerned here with a definite social relation between human beings, which, in their eyes, has here assumed the semblance of a relation between things >. Semblance here stands for the whole definition of fetishism .. And in doing that the word semblance functions like a fetish . It is a synecdoche ?the part for the whole, a fragment for the total?, a word standing for a whole sentence or paragraph. The fetish is a substitute, an imperfect symbol, which refers to its former whole, to what it stands for and at the same time, obscures the reference and becomes a dead end, an end in itself. Indeed it would be impossible to trace back the source without the appropriate help provided by First Half of < A >-9.
In hampering composition and reducing the number of eligible words at a given place in the line, it participates in the selection that makes composition, thus determining the language ?the style? of the final poem. Zukofsky?s faith in the transforming capacity of labor, in its capacity to transmute material, to shine through, to fluoresce .. Similarly the fetishistic mode of quotation testifies to a faith that the reading, selecting, copying, condensing process can crystallize in a single word. Interestingly, the process of the memory of words combines a fetishistic practice and its opposite, a faith in fluorescence, in the ability of the invisible work ?seven years of thought and two years of writing for the first canzone alone? to shine through, to affect reality.
6 The one-word quote as talisman.
With the years the personal prescriptions for one?s work recede, thankfully, before an interest that nature as creator had more of a hand in it than one was aware. The work then owns perhaps something of the look of found objects in late exhibits?which arrange themselves as it were, one object near another?roots that have become sculpture, wood that appears talisman, and so on : charms, amulets maybe, but never really such things since the struggles so to speak that made them do not seem to have been human trials and evils?they appear entirely natural. (Preface to Found Objects, Prepositions, 168 (Bold type and underlining mine.)
What this later quote introduces is the anthropological dimension of the fetish as talisman, charm or amulet.
Ex: quoting one word by Henry James in ?Lilac?. The fact that the word has been used, touched by James endows it with special properties, with added value. Cf. Frazer?s descriptions of contagion by contiguity, of instances of metonymic, magical thought.
Conclusion: The memory of words in the service of Z?s cubed condensation. Importance of synecdoche. A particular case of metonymy, it privileges contiguity rather than resemblance and is therefore highly appropriate for an ?Objectivist? and materialist. But also implies the part?s totalizing claim and is therefore perfect for one with such a strong impulse to include, to totalize.
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