The paradox that is language.(Read It Again)(Book review)

Read It Again, by Chris Wallace-Crabbe; Salt Publishing, 2005, $45.

IN HIS 1975 BOOK Chinese Theories of Literature, James J.Y. Liu draws a very interesting parallel between Mallarme and the third-century BC Daoist philosopher Zhuang Zi. Both noted the "paradoxical nature of language as the necessary but inadequate means of expressing the ineffable", but whereas Zhuang Zi, and Chinese poets in general, accepted this in good measure as part of the human condition, Mallarme struggled most of his life against it and strove "to give our tribal words a pristine meaning" (Donner un sens plus pur au mots de la tribu). And, as he remarked to Camille Mauclair, "we are all failures ... How can we be otherwise, when we measure our finiteness against infinity? We place our short life and feeble strength in the balance with an ideal which, by definition, cannot be attained." That failure, as Liu notes, ultimately is "an acceptance of the challenge of Art to attempt the impossible".

Read It Again, a baker's dozen of essays on contemporary Western poetry and poets, opens with a series of essays that deal precisely with the theme of the paradox. In the first half of the book, from "The Language of Poems" and "Poetry and the Common Tongue" to "The Escaping Word" and "In the Pop Age", Chris Wallace-Crabbe grapples with the chimeric nature of how poetry employs language and how this compares to prose. Fully aware that the fire-breathing monster has a lion's head, a goat's body, and a serpent's tail, he tackles the various parts with a fresh approach that at times might seem contradictory, as is wont of paradoxes, but ultimately if anything can be said about poetry it must account for the sheer range and variety of poetry; from the performance poetry of Pi O to the prophetic wisdom poetry of Blake. Only by tackling each facet on its own terms can the reality, which is always more interesting than any monolithic theory, begin to be glimpsed.

Having stated in the introduction that "Poetry has the misfortune to be written in the medium of language" (misfortune in terms of the common usage of the medium from parliamentary debate to gossip and emails), and noted the "deep-woven" dichotomy between poetry and prose, Wallace-Crabbe offers some genuine insights by exploring the "seldom-enunciated assumption that prose gives an account of Becoming, poetry of Being".

It is of course in the nature of a paradox that it remains so regardless of our struggle to bring a more customary logic to bear on the argument. But at times one wonders if the whole approach is not bound up with the argumentative or adversarial stance that we have inherited from ancient Greek culture. Pitting verse and prose against each other, or contrasting a rarefied use of language against the vernacular, is part of the sanctioned brief of literary criticism; the case, however, is all too often dependent on the skill of the advocate rather than the matter at hand.

As in all enquiry, the premise determines the proceedings: once we accept that the medium of poetry is language we are trapped into the conundrum. An alternative would be to view language as the product, rather than the medium, of poetry. ...