"....We are concerned here with the novel employment of certain grammatical categories which fundamentally reveal the new consciousness-structure. These include:
a) the adjective and the adverb,b) the substantivation of the infinitive,c) the rejection of "because" or "since,"d) the rejection of "as" or "like" (simile),e) modification of the comparative degree,f) beginnings with "and," as well asg) the new rhyme."Gebser,
The Ever-Present Origin, p. 498
a) the adjective and the adverb,The most noticeable change has occurred since Romanticism in the usage of adjectives. Until classicism, the adjective was used to modify the substantive, and often lent things an anthropomorphic character, depriving them of their independence and subordinating them to a perspectival anthropocentrism. The "furious" or "courageous" sword and similar formulations of that epoch are familiar to everyone. Or it was used as an "adorning attribute," as ain classical antiquity, although it has been overlooked until now that the
epitheton ornans, for example, the
"owl-eyed Athena,"is a numinous ascription and not at all an adornment. Since Romanticism the adjective has been losing its meaning as a mere descriptive term and has become a relational word. This is most saliently expressed where adverbs are changed into adjectives, as for example in Kafka’s phrase, "and while greeting, [he] stepped into the grass." (221) Ever since Holderlin and Heinrich Heine, examples of the new, aperspectival use of adjectives can be found, as in the works of Franz Kafka, Georg Trakl, Paul Valery, Rainer Maria Rilke, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Jorge Guillen, among others. (222)
In all these instances the one-sided rigidity is superseded. Instead of the previous reference of the adjective to one substantive, the attribute now emphasizes the relationship among things and is effective in all directions. An action is no longer observed from the standpoint of the subject, but also from the object. Kafka no longer says, "and while greeting, stepped laterally into the grass," but "and while greeting, stepped into the lateral grass." The temporal "stepped" moves into close relationship with the spatial "lateral grass."’ Space and time are joined. The relationship is no longer determined adverbially from one side with reference only to the object, but also adjectivally with reference to the world, for in this instance the "lateral grass" is the world.
b) the substantivation of the infinitive,The new usage of the adjective -- Reto R.. Bezzola has defined it as "adjectival ambivalence" and the attribute-dissolving element" (223) -- points to the changed valuation of the subject. this altered valuation is also visible in the increasng substantivation of the verb in its infinitival form. Since the substantive can be considered to be the static and the verb the actuating or the substantive and a resolution of the opposites and relates the fixed, the static, to the temporal world in the closest way possible. (224)
c) the rejection of "because" or "since,"While the new employment of the adjective and the substantivation of the infinitive structurally resolve perspectival rigidity, rejection of "because" expresses the extrication from the exclusive claim of causal thinking. By "rejection of "because" or "since," conjunctions that have always established reasons in terms of the
causal nexus. Their avoidance reflects a recognition of acausality and an insight into the ever-present manifold aspectuality of possible relations and interdependencies. Replacement of the "because" by a colon, for example, is a frequent stylistic device in modern literature found in Hopkins, and used subsequently not only by T.S. Eliot (225) but by other poets, and occurs with increasing frequency even in prose. (226)
d) the rejection of "as" or "like" (simile),What we some years ago called the "rejection of simile" is also symptomatic for the new consciousness structure. (227) In one of his letters from the time of the First World War, Rilke rejected the usage "like" and "as"; this same rejection later occurs in the world of Paul Eluard. (228) The simile, being always a systematization, is experienced as a lie; the perpetual one-sided, rigidifying determination inherent iin the use of "as/like" can no longer be endured by an understanding that has transcended exclusive systematization. Every postulation of likeness, or similarity, insofar as it is a postulation, is experienced as a violation. The rejection of simile in the new poetry expresses the systatic element and the awareness that the concern can only be with interrelationships and not with likenesses.
e) modification of the comparative degree,The "rejection of simile" is expressed in an intensified form in the new use of the comparative degree. This usage underscores the validity of rejecting the measuring, mental comparison in favor of the living and almost acausally present wealth of relationships. Recently the comparative has been used solely for its own sake without the "than" previously deemed necessary. Thus Rilke’s statement, "The more envisaged world wants to flourish in love." (229) When considered in relation to the rejection of simile, this example, among countless others, is neither a mere comparison as an afterthought, as Werner Gunther has suggested, (230) nor a heighteneing or introspection of the sense, as Hans Egon Holthusen has understood it. (231) Particulary evident here is rejection of any one-sided relationships: the traditional relation to an object of comparison via the now eliminated "than" becomes redundant. The relationship is now open and no longer perspectivally fixed: it signifies all possible relation. This form of the comparative is overdetermined. In other words, the spatial position of co-ordination and superordination of two proximate things is replaced by an attempt to establish the spatio-temporal interrelationship. Or expressed still another way, the comparison of parts is replaced by a relationship to the whole which is always overdetermined with respect to the parts.
f) beginnings with "and," as well asg) the new rhyme.A similar emphasis .. is expressed in the new stylistic peculiarity of beginnings with "and" in the new prose have become commonplace; there the "and" is not required to enumerate or sum up or even to intimate such functions. This new "and" and its novel usage emphasizes interconnections which are not exhausted in enumerative and narrative-sequential thought and tits summation of parts.
A poem, for instance, is not placed in space as a self-contained and thus spatially limited construction, but rather participates in the whole; its "and" beginning joins with the invisible, to which it communicates visibility and audibility throughout the poem. The "everlasting plenitude" of an event is not sectored, or perspeectivally fixed; rather, this artistic and stylistic device expresses the open structure of being. A parallel can be found in the new music, for example in Manuel de Falla’s ballet
The Three-Cornered Hat, which begins right in the very middle of its principal theme. (234) Let us also recall that the "and" beginnings and endings in James Joyce, for example, correspond to a characteristic of modern music, as
Krenek points out: the new music is music "without beginning or end" (p. 457). the "and" acquires a new value, and by so doing, alters the structure of language. Instead of being a knot splicing the thread of a story, it becomes a word of plenitude.
The earliest example of this may well be Holderlin’s "Halfte des Lebens" (Half of Life): (235)
Mit gelben Birnen hanget
Und voll mit wilden Rosen
Das Land in den See,
thr holden Schwane,
Und trunken von Kussen
Tunkt ihr das Haupt
Ins heillignuchterne Wasser.
(Hanging with yellow pears
And full of wild roses
The land into the lake,
Ye lovely swans,
And drunken with kisses
You dip your heads
Into the holy-sober water.)
This sort of "and" is clearer still at the beginning of Holderlin’s poem "An einem Baum" (
By a Tree): "Und die ewigen Bahnen / lachelnd uber uns / hin zogen die Herrscher der Welt" (And the eternal paths / smiling above us / attract the rulers of the world). This is no longer a summary "and," but rather opens as it were the "mundane region" to a more encompassing one, achieving with this a decisive structural change in language. (236)
The same re-evaluation ofonce insignificant words is reflected in the new rhyme. Not only the copula "and," but, in marked contrast to the usage of classicism, the articles, relative pronouns, pronouns, prepositions, conjunctions, adjectives, adverbs, etc., are used as rhyme words. Rilke rhymes "und" (and) with "Mund" (mouth); Mallarme rhymes "maints" (few) with "demains" (tomorrow) and "au" (at the) with "numero" (number); Edith Sitwell rhymes "these" with "trees," and Verlaine rhymes "dela" with "a la," to cite a few among scores of examples, (237) Just as each colour is of equal value in modern painting -- the maxim of the new painting since the turn of the century -- so is each words of the poem in the new poetry of equal importance: there are no more filler or make-shift words, just as in painting transitional expedient colours are excluded. The fact that no one part is over or undervalued (as was true in perspectival poetry and painting), and that the constant validty of the whole excludes emphasis of any part, lends this mode of rhyming its aperspectival imprint. Thus it must not be confused with the rhyme-mannerism of the Baroque, in which Gongora excelled. Its mode of rhyming is an ecstatic and playful emergence
Structurally, the new valuation of time in poetry emerges purely in the
diction, and thus is primarily amenable to an examination of grammar and
syntax. We have poetry of R.M. Rilke, among others. (216) The magnificent poem by Mallarme, "Un cubist poem, (217) contains "ruptures of construction" and syntactical liberties that has been annotated in detail by Claude Roulet. (218) Hopkins indulged in an unequalled freedom of diction and style, and is the first to employ an expressly "colon style": where one might expect a "because" or a "since." Hopkins places a colon, thus interrupting the oriented course of events and superseding perspectivity, which is displaced by the acausal relationship and the pure utterance.
Marcel Proust has constructed periods of a length previously alien to Friench, a language distinguished from all others by its clarity of construction. the purely rational construction, the syntactically clearly articulated sentence, is extended, indeed exploded, by page-long periodic sentences. Each of these sentences is a world, expressed by the spinning-out of every subordinate clause and by the multifarious relation of every word, every event, and every evocation to all others. His is an almost oceanic style, floating the utterances on waves until the breathless wave of the sentence breaks, its foamy crests, airy spray, and ground swell taken over by the next unfolding wave. This style reflects the psychic dimension: Proust’s language traverses the sea of the soul, rediscovering the temporal duration of the psychic which permits him to reach the shore of the achronon following his experience of the sea. Like us, Proust is a
survivor of the shiprwreck of timelessness, in which the awareness of being free from the ordinances of time is revealed to him. (219)
James Joyce partially dissolves grammatical construction and gives free reign to the powers of association. Thomas Mann exaggerates the constructions to the point of mannerism, seeking to illuminate the multi-facetedness of the phenomena described ty the aid of stylistic excess. Since it is of merely passing import, we need not elaborate on the total destruction of all grammatical coherence practiced by the
Dadaists and even the Surrealists, among others. (220) All of this signifies an attempt to reject the purely discursive rationalistic mode of thought. Now and then it succeeds, granting us the realization of an aperspectival inception. Frequently it merely shatters old, proven values without attaining the new,
space-time-free realization. Yet it can no longer be ignored today that, attendant upon this rejection, a number of grammatical categories have undergone a fundamental functional alteration as they are used or avoided in modern poetry.
To be continued.
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