Abstract
This chapter continues the investigation of the logic of lyric in Vedic poetry, focusing on the Vedic poetics proposed by Vladimir Toporov. Toporov identifies the action of the esoteric function most explicitly, and this explicit identification is compared to Starobinski’s discussion of Saussure’s interest in identifying anagrams in Vedic and Roman poetry. The action of the esoteric function as Toporov and Saussure identify it helps to promote the stable transmission of the poem. This sets the stage for the first legitimation of poetic reason, which takes the form of a transcendental deduction of poetic reason based on Roman Jakobson’s identification of the fundamental linguistic functions. In Jakobson the role of the esoteric function is a limiting case of what Jakobson calls the poetic function. At the end of the chapter, I return to the American tradition of poetry to exemplify the value of what has been established by the investigation into the logic of lyric.
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Notes
- 1.
Toporov cites a passage from Valéry which strongly suggests that Valéry identified something intrinsically modern in the sort of poetic connections Toporov considers: “The poet’s operation is exercised by means of the complex value of words, that is, in composing at once sound and sense … like algebra operating on complex numbers” (cited, Toporov 1981, 194). The comparison to operating on complex numbers suggests that the poetic use of language “torques” it (Bassler 2012, 174 ff). This twisting is obviously related to Lacan’s fascination with the topology of the Möbius strip and related figures.
- 2.
This leaves outstanding the question how we are to identify exactly what counts as the template, as opposed to the variations.
- 3.
Apologies: underperiods have not been supplied.
- 4.
‘Set’ is being used to translate the Russian ustanovka, “a calque for German Einstellung, a philosophical term designating apperception, the viewpoint or mental set crucial in the perceiver’s constituting an object” (Jakobson 1990, 506, n. 2 to Chap. 2).
- 5.
Jakobson insists that the formalist orientation he shares with Tynjanov, Mukařovský and Šklovskij is erroneously identified with an “art for art’s sake approach”: “What we stand for is not the autonomy of art but the autonomy of the aesthetic function” (Jakobson 1990, 378). What I am insisting is that the autonomy of the aesthetic function” should also not be understood on analogy with art for art’s sake: the function is autonomous in the sense that it cannot be reduced to other functions. The same holds true for the poetic function conceived of as a basic linguistic function.
- 6.
In terms of the diagram given above, Jakobson also identifies first (emotive), second (conative) and third (referential) persons with the genres of lyric, exhortation, and epic respectively (Jakobson 1990, 70). Gerard Génette notes that while epic and drama are clearly represented as genres in Aristotle’s poetics, lyric, which is usually taken as the third classical genre, is not present. Rather, Aristotle establishes a correlation between three styles of address and three genres: heroic verse (epic), iambic verse (tragedy and comedy) and the dithyramb. It is in the eighteenth century that the dithyramb is identified with the lyric (Génette 1977, 391). In fact, Génette argues that to attribute a system of genres to Aristotle at all is an anachronism.
- 7.
This observation has implications for those semioticians who would seek to divest Jakobson’s scheme from its connection to a full code associated with the metalinguistic function. While I am sympathetic to the idea that an explicit code is not structurally inherent to Jakobson’s scheme but is rather extrinsically assumed, the phatic function always implies the establishment of some context, and the identification of this context is the first step in the process of “decoding” a given message. Although in many actual cases, the phatic function will be inclusive of establishing the code in terms of which the message is given (“Hello” indicates, for example, that the code is English), this is not necessary. These points are especially important in the appropriation, modification or rejection of Jakobson’s scheme for musical semiotics (Nattiez 1990, esp. 16–19, Grant 2001, 155–8). For related reasons, Jakobson introduces the distinction between introversive and extroversive semiosis in his essay, “Language in Relation to Other Communication Systems,” (Jakobson 1971, 697–708); also (Nattiez 1990, 111–17) and (Agawu 1991, 132–3).
- 8.
Here again musical composition presents itself as a crucial test-case.
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Bassler, O.B. (2022). The Logic of Lyric (Part Two). In: The Legitimacy of Poetic Reason. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12314-6_8
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