Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Reassessment

Chapter 4. The Word and the World

The Word and the World Je propose a chacun 1'ouverture de trappes interieures, un voyage dans 1'epaisseur des choses, une invasion de qualites, une revolution ou une subversion comparable a celle qu'opere la charrue ou la pelle, lorsque, tout a coup et pour la premiere fois, sont mises a jour des millions de parcelles, de paillettes, de racines, de vers et de petites betes jusqu'alors enfouies. O ressources infinies de 1'epaisseur des choses, rendues par les ressources infinies de 1'epaisseur semantique des mots! —Francis Ponge, "Introduction au galet," Proemes Notes for chapter 4 are on pp. 242-44. 0 101 102 Ernest Buckler: Rediscovery and Reassessment Michel Foucault has pointed out that humanity's original relationship to texts was identical to its relationship to things, consisting in both cases in perceiving, decoding, and interpreting visible marks or signs and their correspondences. A symbolic perception of the world persisted until the Renaissance and beyond: Nature was God's book, in which the signatures were hermeneutic points of departure. One read and interpreted the world through correspondences and resemblances between the high and the low, the spiritual and the material. Objects and placesbelonged to a pattern or design governed by unity and sympathy , relations between the part and the whole governed by analogy and proportion. The world was a text that could be read and decoded—it was pregnant with significance, the microcosm echoing the macrocosm, the visible surface reflecting the invisible just as time reflected or was the mobile image of eternity. Scientific and technological advances had not yet marginalized the symbolicand mythological conception of Antiquity. The secularization of society and the loss of the symbol of the Golden Age had not yet distanced the concept of Paradise from the archetype of the ideal topos or place or displaced it from the heart of the poetic imagination. In a similar fashion, language before the ahistorical, mythical Babel was allegedly a perfectly transparent sign of things, which it resembled. After Babel, this transparency, this resemblance to things, was destroyed, and the languages that we speak today are rooted in this lost similitude, in the space left void (Foucault 47-51). Language no longer directly resembles the things it names. As Emile Benveniste points out, nothing signifies anything by itself or through any natural vocation, but through combination regulated by a strict code—the structure of the whole conferring significance or function on the parts (Problemes I 23). The sign's lack of co-naturalness, remarks Hegel, is actually the source of the strength and richness of alphabetic language: the arbitrariness of the signifier liberates the imagination and allows arrangements not possible in a hieroglyphic language. But even if it no longer resembles the things it names, Foucault argues, language is not separated from the world. It continues to be a part of the space in which truth manifests itself, and its relationship with the world is as much that of analogy as that of signifying. Nevertheless, Benveniste remarks a serious difficulty that Saussure encountered but did not resolve: knowing if and how we get from the sign to "la parole" (Cours de linguistique The Word and the World 103 generale 148, 172). Benveniste points out that the world of the sign is closed, that from the sign to the sentence there is no transition, that a hiatus separates them (Problemes II65). In his writing, Buckler seems to be trying to explore this relationship, to bridge the hiatus. Buckler's texts would seem to be grounded in a vision of the world as text, a world in which signs circulate openly. There is a hermeneutic dimension in his work, a certain reordering of the world through logos. For Buckler—to use the terms of Foucault—the writer's knowledge involves making everything speak. It involves interpreting, superimposing the secondary discourse of commentary upon the visible marks, upon what Emerson called "the cipher of the world" (Complete Essays 279). It involves callingattention to the congruity, the correspondencesto which town dwellers have become blind, as in the following passage combining personificationand the blending of sense analogies: This morning, the windows of each house have their eyelids up....The hill beyond the houses talks softly to itself.(...) The hill talks to itself, and this one day in the year the morning talks about itself. I think...of people I have seen in town looking as if their faces...