Newsgroups: bit.listserv.literary
Date:         Mon, 7 Sep 1992 16:48:28 CST
From:         frank <BAE03@TWNTKU10.BITNET>
Subject:      poetry/fiction

Yes, the whole issue of the poetry/fiction is a very interesting & also very
complex one.....Contemporary lit theorists talk about "poetics" on the one hand
(it can include all forms of lit) & "narratology" or "forms of narrative" on th
e other (also can devour evverything else)....In post-structuralist theory, of
course, there is no clear distinction between a philosophical or (lit) critical
text and a literary one, whether novel or (in the more "radical" view at least)
poem....But forgetting all this theoretical nonsense (the thrust of which is th
at phil/critical essays, novels,  poems all have finally indetermainate meaning
s "in themselves" and also that boundaries between these forms of "writing" are
finally indeterminate...), it's easy to see the complexity of the matter by con
sidering these pts:
  (1) Homer (& epic poets generally) are writing extended narratives (="novels"
) in verse....Homer has dactylic hexameter with spondees (?), metaphor & simile
, alliteration & all your good "poetic" stuff...(Shakespeare writes drama in
iambic pentameter, in brilliant poetry....According to one theory, in the West
at least the other genres all are somehow "grounded" in poetry....poetry is the
most concise/rarified vverbal art form....like the way in which bio, chem and
physics are grounded in mathematics?)
  (2) Makarovsky, Jacobsen & Russian formalists/Prague linguists (early 20th C)
: "poetic language" is a special kind of language calls attention to the "code"
(ie the language as a physical, phonemic entity) itself, rather than to a mean-
ing outside the language (reference, intended meaning, "communication" in that
sense). Thus if I say, as in a novel, "The boy walked out the door, holding his
gun...." the sentence communicates a fact about the (virtual or imagined) world
 or "reality" of the novel....(that raises another complex issue, finally rela-
ted to the issue of poetic language?)...but if I say "But I have  promises to
keep/And miles to go before I sleep/And miles to go before I sleep" this has in
addition to a "discursive" or "referential"  sense (maybe ambiguous, different
interpretations) a more purely "poetic" sense grounded in rhythm, rhyme, allit-
eration, assonance (phonemic properties of language/diction) AND in repetition
(last line, rhyme/allit//asso also = forms of repet....raises another issue)
 AND in visual form of lines on page (= form of repet? anyway some sort of aes-
thetic frame or form) AND in the use of tropes = figurativve lang = metaphor,
simile, synechdoce, metonymy...("walking" = ? "sleep" = ?) tho with this last
(tropes) we may be on the border-line between referential "meaning" and formal/
self-reflecting properties of the lang, lang that pts back at itself....(In nor
mal communicative discourse we wouldn't use metaphors, except in fact for the f
act that many english idioms are based on metaphors..."spur of the moment" etc
(very interesting one, isn't it? maybe shakespeare?) tho when we use them in no
rmal conversation we are not conscious of the metaphor as metaphor (vs POMES).
    (3) Now, the pt about Woolf, Joyce, Beckett and many of the best fiction
writers is that their fiction is very poetic, full of poetic language that draw
s attention to itself as a self-enclosed aesthetic form...(also shakespeare's
plays)...but the best fiction writers (& dramatists? not neil simon surely)
   also construct vvery coherent/complex plots or "virtual realities" out of al
l their external-world references....and also believvable/complex characters,
etc.....that is, they combine poetic language with various (strictly) "narrativ
e" devices.....Jacobsen's analysis: poetry has the metaphorical = vertical axis
 and the metonymic = horizontal = syntagmatic axis: in a line of poetry you
  simultaneously keep extending the line (syntagmatically) by completing the
thought/reference and following/violating rules of syntax, AND also use symbols
/metaphors to refer to another level of meaning/reality, to givve aesthetic
unity to the whole poem (with extended metaphors, etc)...or something like that
, i don't really understand jacobsen, someone please explain....so in fiction
al discourse (narrative) according to 1 theory, the metonymic/syntagmatic func
tion of pure contiguity in space/time predominates, in poetry the meta function
atdt 6203126