Windows and Doors: A Poet Reads Literary Theory

Front-Loading Syntax

19 Front-Loading Syntax As I altered my syntax, I altered my intellect. W. B. Yeats While animals communicate using signals that refer to whole situations, syntax is unique to human beings. Animal calls (birdsong , for example) can be continuous analogue signals or a series of random variations one a time, but my cat’s meow while standing in front of his empty food bowl differs from Oliver Twist’s “Please, sir, I want some more.” Oliver can separate the parts of his sentence to form new ones. In other words, human language consists of components that have their own meaning and can be arranged to make new messages. Syntax allows for a larger language repertoire and bypasses mere memorization. Humans memorize words and their functions (for example, whether they are nouns or verbs) but they do not memorize every message they relate. Thirty years ago linguist Noam Chomsky argued that human babies are born with a sense of syntax that transcends individual languages. Since then, others have been attempting to discover universal patterns. For instance, Gugliemo Cinque posits that every language consists of sentences based on a verb phrase surrounded by modifiers in predictable patterns.1 When the field narrows to a particular language, patterns become easy to identify (grammatical rules). In order to write well, writers must master not only words, but also syntax, the rules of their ordering. Moreover, understanding syntax allows writers to bend or break rules in ways that serve their work. 20 Form and Content Syntax reveals the interrelatedness of form and content, and the paradoxes that result in discussing one without the other. Most literature contains paraphrasable ideas; its form (including syntax ) conveys these ideas. In The Rhetoric, Aristotle writes: For it is not enough to know what we ought to say; we must also say it as we ought. . . . The arts of language cannot help but having a small but real importance . . . the way in which a thing is said does affect its intelligibility. Not however, so much importance as people think. All such arts are fanciful and meant to charm the hearer. Nobody uses fine language when teaching geometry.2 Using the model of an orator convincing a crowd, Aristotle seems to separate form and content, yet Martha Nussbaum argues that in ancient Greece “forms of writing were not seen as vessels into which different contents could be indifferently poured; form was itself a statement, a content.”3 The answer to the apparent contradiction rests in flexible use of the terms “form” and “content .” Any attempt to impose a neat or chronological development of the relationship of form to content has been, at least for me, impossible. Form and content are variables on a seesaw that can be tipped in either direction. Suspicion of “fine language,” for instance, stretches from the Bible and Aristotle to contemporary anthropologist Yi-Fu Tuan, who believes that “truth dwells, if anywhere, in simple speech. Christ said: ‘plain yes or no is all you need to say; anything beyond that comes from the devil’ . . . truth cannot be netted in artful speech.”4 If style is like a dress that adorns a body, an attack on style is a quick way to discredit a writer. For instance, John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding associates rhetoric with “the Fair Sex”: “All the Art of Rhetorick, besides Order and Clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of Words Eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong Ideas, move the Passions, and thereby mislead the Judgment . . . Eloquence, like the Fair Sex has too prevailing Beauties in it, to suffer itself ever to be spoken against.”5 We 21 might note the other binary oppositions alluded to here: male/ female, reason/emotion, mind/body. Seeing that “eloquence” and the “fair sex” were equated in order to dismiss them, some women writers rejected “flowery diction” and “elegant” syntax. Here, for example, is Mary Wollstonecraft: Wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time rounding periods, or in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings. . . . I shall be employed about things, not words!6 Wollstonecraft’s division between style and content is termed dualism. Dualists believe there are different ways of saying the same thing, that a sentence can be paraphrased and not lose its message. In 1818 Hegel addressed the...