Seeing them this way entails a critique of what might be called the Cartesianism that deeply informs these metaphors and of the coherent, stable, and knowable subject that this logic, whether explicitly or covertly, constitutes as the prior, authorizing agent and condition of texts and reading. 34 One may explore the nature of the rhythmical performance of poetry by a close scrutiny of some crucial points in Douglas Hodge's recording of Keats's Elgin Marbles sonnet. The manipulations of the vocal devices, on the one hand, and the postulated mental processes, on the other, enable the listener's cognitive system to perceive both the language and the versification units when those conflict. To detect the unconscious of a literary text, one must regard all its explicit elements as manifest content and the nonexplicit links among them as latent content. One tends to think of the more idiosyncratic language of narration as the primary site of unconscious meanings because its distinctive style corresponds to the analysand's individual associations, but dialogue may be a better place to seek the unconscious of the text because it is conventional.
Dialogue is governed by social usage that provides the unconscious with a ready-made disguise.
On the one hand, Freud's dependence on conventional symbols and Lacan's claim that the unconscious is formed by cultural codes make speech a node of overdetermined meanings, and, on the other, linguists account for the special capacity of dialogue to bear multiple meanings. A Gay Fantasia on National Themes. This discovery struck him as sublime, suggesting that things are not discrete and static, but condensations of vast systems of force. He translated this insight into a sublime writing style, in which sentences are dynamic patterns charged with meaning on semantic, syntactic, and auditory levels. The master trope of Nature is metalepsis, which, as John Hollander has shown, compresses numerous tropes, figures, and allusions into dense linguistic sites that overwhelm readers with complexity.