Abstract

This book is of considerable interest to philosophers. Bruns studies poetry from two perspectives: as hermetic and as orphic. In the first, a poem is considered as a self-sufficient whole, admirable and analyzable in itself, the world-reference of its words suspended; in the second, a poem is considered much as Heidegger takes the work of poets, as establishing a world in which meaning can be found, as instituting a condition in which words and being are indistinguishable. Of the book’s eight chapters, six are devoted to the hermetic and two, the last two, are concerned with the orphic. The literary theories and opinions of the Russian Formalists, the Prague Structuralists, Wallace Stevens, Valéry, Barthes, and Foucault are presented as the first modern move towards a hermetic sense of poetry; the literary object is considered as determined by a system of pure relations. The movement is further studied in a chapter on Mallarmé and his attempt to isolate the book and writing from any worldly context, to employ the physical and spatial character of words written on a blank page as the ultimate setting for what is stated; even syntax begins to evaporate, leaving spatial constellation as the principle of order. The hermetic is further intensified in Flaubert and Joyce. Bruns uses Jakobson’s opposition of metaphor and metonymy as a framework here; metaphor is the process of substituting one word or unit of language for another, metonymy the process of annexing other units to the one we have; it works in combination, association, syntax, and the linkage of sentences. Metaphor is normally dominant in poetry, metonymy in narration and prose. But in the prose of Flaubert and Joyce, metaphor comes to prevail. In Flaubert there still remains room for metonymy and its narrative element, but in Joyce metonymy is overwhelmed by metaphor. The extreme is reached in Finnegan’s Wake, where the principle of substitution, metaphor, reaches beyond the replacement of one word by another, into replacements among parts of words: "eventide," for example, blends with "Eve," and completely new words are formed which are, however, parasitic on established words, as the writer attempts to control that which classically remained beyond his free manipulation, the very establishment of words out of phonemic units. The writer tries to move in an area of the subconscious calculus, to insert his choices beyond the limits of what he seemed forced to take for granted. In all this the linguistic object and not the world becomes more and more the writer’s theme, and the last step is reached in the chapter on Beckett. Bruns describes various transformations of language found in Beckett’s work, and concludes with Lessness, in which all syntax is dissolved and no ordering principle seems to remain; correlatively, the speaker of such surrealistic discourse also loses his identity.