Picture Poetry, Mannerism, and Sign Relationships

This article explores some cognitive and aesthetic principles about picture poems. It regards language as a hierarchy of signs: the graphemic string signifies a phonological string, which signifies units of meaning, which signify referents in extralinguistic reality. Our linguistic competence urges us to reach the final referents as fast as possible. Poetic language draws attention to itself, that is, to the hierarchy of signifiers. In manneristic styles there is a greater awareness of the separateness of signifiers than in nonmanneristic styles; hence their witty or disorienting effect.Whereas rhyme, meter, and alliteration impose additional patterning on the phonological signifiers, picture poems, acrostics, and some other manneristic devices impose additional patterning upon the graphemic signifiers. When alliterations are turned into puns, they become manneristic patterning of the phonological signifier. It is argued, by analogy with synesthesia, that stable characteristic visual shapes obstruct smooth perceptual fusion, and, on the basis of speech perception, that speech sounds are special in our cognitive economy, and visual patterning cannot achieve the naturalness of their patterning. That is why visual patterning is not admitted in nonmanneristic styles. Cognitive poetics suggests that in the response to poetry, adaptive devices are turned to an aesthetic end. In a universe in which ‘‘the center cannot hold,’’ readers of poetry find pleasure not so much in the emotional disorientation caused by manneristic devices, but rather in the reassertion that their adaptive devices, when disrupted, function properly. This is one reason manneristic styles recur in cultural and social periods in which more than one scale of values prevails. This article offers a cognitive-semiotic discussion, on a generic level, of picture poetry (sometimes called pattern poetry, visual poetry, concrete poetry, calliThis research was partly supported by the Israel Science Foundation. Poetics Today : (Winter ). Copyright ©  by the Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. 752 Poetics Today 21:4 grammes, or carmina figurata).1 It offers no close reading of any specific poem, and no overview of the history of the genre or its research. It examines two observations prevalent among critics and theoreticians of picture poetry: first, that it is ‘‘artificial,’’ ‘‘eccentric,’’ ‘‘extravagant,’’ ‘‘manneristic’’;2 and second, that its appearance in the history of literature is discontinuous: it tends to occur in certain historical-social-cultural contexts and is absent from others. I will explain these two issues through a homogeneous set of principles based on certain sign relationships, arguing that alliteration, metaphysical pun, andpicture poetry are a sequence of increasinglymarked poetic devices, and explore picture poetry as the highest item on this scale of markedness. Such a model suggests that these devices reflect similar poetic principles and can account, at the same time, for the perceived stylistic differences between them. I contend that mannerist styles are more prone to resort to the more marked devices than nonmannerist styles. I will not view the visual element as something added to poetry, imported from the visual arts, but as a logical extension of the linguistic and aesthetic principles of poetic language.This article focuses on some arbitrary sign relationships involving a hierarchy of signs: grapheme→phoneme→wordmeaning (each later item being the signified of the preceding one). More specifically, I will argue that both picture poetry and certain sound effects in John Donne and Wallace Stevens result from assigning two sign functions to one signifier—on the graphemic and the phonemic levels, respectively. By contrast, nonmanneristic styles, such as Classicist and romantic poetry, typically resort to only one sign function and involve the nonreferential patterning of the phonological signifier. The string of phonological signifiers, I will suggest, is just as arbitrary in reference to the semantic signifieds as the string of graphemic signifiers is in reference to the phonological signifieds. As we shall see, this is not always taken for granted.The focus on this kind of sign relation conspicuously differs from the one emphasized by such writers as Georges Longrée (), who also uses semiotic terminology.The calligramme, Longrée says, ‘‘con. This is a thoroughly revised version of my paper ‘‘Picture Poetry’’ published in Psyart—A Hyperlink Journal for the Psychological Study of the Arts. Available on-line at web.clas.ufl. edu/ipsa/journal/index.htm. . Even scholars who devoted serious research to this kind of poetry may have recourse to these adjectives. In his article ‘‘Carmina Figurata in Pre-Modern Hebrew Poetry’’ (in Hebrew ‘‘Hebrew picture poems and other artificial forms’’) the great Hebrew poet and scholar Dan Pagis summarizes a prevalent view: ‘‘Apparently, epigones of those schools, unable to continue the great traditions of their predecessors or produce an essentially new style, tried to capture their readers by a display of sheer virtuosity of form’’ and raises the question ‘‘When does a common and generally accepted formal device become eccentric andmanneristic?’’ (Pagis , quoted from the English summary).This article will suggest a principled answer to that question. Tsur • Picture Poetry, Mannerism, and Sign Relationships 753 sists of two messages: the iconic message is perceived all at once, whereas the linguisticmessage requires amore deliberate and analytical reading. . . . It is the relationship between the twomessages—theirmodes of interdependence—which we would like to study in the course of this paper’’ (ibid.: ). In Longrée’s view, ‘‘The signifieds (signifiés) are shaped by the real objects, the signifiers (signifiants) by those objects which are schematically produced by the pen’’ (ibid.). That is, Longrée focuses on an iconic relationship between a visual image generated in the text and ‘‘the real objects.’’ He seems undisturbed by the ‘‘artificiality’’ of picture poems; instead, he works out in detail the multiple relationships between the visual and the verbal images. Sabine Gross (: ) focuses on ‘‘the parallel signification’’ of the two messages, but also acknowledges occasional differences between the harmonious and amusing quality of their fusion. She writes, ‘‘The traditional approach to pattern poems has been to emphasize their unity, which derives from the parallel signification, and to consider this double signification of the shaped poem—as image and word—either in terms of the two modes complementing each other harmoniously to the point of merging, or as an amusing but largely redundant overdetermination.’’ 3 Exploring a hierarchy of arbitrary sign series in this article allows me to make certain crucial stylistic distinctions in terms of relationships between signifiers and signifieds: a variety of mannerist devices are perceived as being more artificial, less natural than their nonmanneristic counterparts. For this I will attempt to account in a systematic, principled manner.These distinctions are both relational and qualitative: they rely on the devices’ relative place in the hierarchy of signs and on our different response to phonemic and graphemic signifiers.4 In art history and criticism mannerism has three different but related meanings, which all refer to artistic and literary phenomena that focus the reader’s (or the audience’s) attention on the individual figures rather than on the composition of the whole. First, many critics use the term pejoratively to refer to a style that is characterized by an excess of ornaments and frequent repetition of a limited number of stylistic devices, especially when not required. This is what Willie van Peer means when he says that a seventeenth-century text of ‘‘wing poems’’ is ‘‘to a modern reader . . . little more than a manneristic game.’’ Second, at least one theoretician uses mannerism positively to refer to the cultural period between the Renaissance . I wish I were the author of Gross’s article. But to do justice to it from the cognitive and semiotic point of view would require another full-length article. . The foregoing is not a criticism of Longrée. In another article I too might be engaged in exactly the same kinds of activity. I just wanted to indicate the place of this article in the study of picture poems. 754 Poetics Today 21:4 and the Baroque: ‘‘Thus, mannerism has twomodes, technical and psychological. Behind the technical ingenuities of mannerist style there usually is a personal unrest, a complex psychology that agitates the form and the phrase’’ (Sypher : ).Wylie Sypher’s use links the termmannerismwith metaphysical. The third meaning of the term refers to other styles or cultural periods that in some way resemble the second meaning of mannerism, including some trends of modernism. Giorgio Melchiori () uses the term in the third meaning, when he calls Henry James and Gerard Manley Hopkins ‘‘two mannerists.’’ This article addresses all three meanings of mannerism: it considers a ‘‘mannerist’’ device that is condemned by many critics as being excessively mannered or artificial, that tends to recur in periods that are ‘‘manneristic’’ in the second or the third sense of the term.This article examines the implication of such ‘‘mannerist’’ devices and periods that evoke ‘‘a personal unrest’’ or require ‘‘a complex psychology’’ to cope with. Van Peer on Typographic Foregrounding This article was written in response to Willie van Peer’s  essay ‘‘Typographic Foregrounding.’’ It explores some cognitive and aesthetic principles concerning picture poems and suggests that some of these principles, pace the apparent extravagance of these poems, are logical extensions of principles that exist in poetry of a more conservative type. It will also try to do justice to their extravagance. Van Peer’s abstract says This article investigates the way in which devices of foregrounding play a role at the typographical level of a text’s organisation. In poetry, such devices are very old and are regularly used in a bold way, thereby creating specific effects. However, a historical overview reveals that such bold typographic experiments are not distributed evenly over time. It also emerges that some of these texts survive in the literary canon, while others are forgotten. On the basis of an analysis of some test cases in literary history, hypotheses are proposed which may explain this uneven distribution. Van Peer’s essay focuses on George Herbert’s ‘‘Easter Wings,’’ which is, according to Gross (: ), ‘‘arguably the most famous example in the history of English literature.’’ My discussion deals with only some characteristics of the genre and refers to the poemonly through vanPeer’s analysis. Writing about ‘‘Easter Wings,’’ van Peer says: This is an unmistakably religious poem, one of the best-known texts from Herbert’s The Temple, and one of the most authentic expressions of devotion in the Anglican church. . . . The title explicitly refers to a subject matter correspondTsur • Picture Poetry, Mannerism, and Sign Relationships 755 (Hutchinson : ) ing to the typographical form. The wings symbolize man’s elevation resulting from his belief in Revelation: note also the reference to the divine wings (‘‘imp my wing on Thine’’) and to the lark, yet another explicit topicalisation of the motif of the wing (‘‘With Thee/ O let me rise/ As larks’’). More important still is the fact that each stanza displays a typographical form which closely mirrors the development of the theme. This can be seen quite clearly from the verbs and their distribution across verse lines. Each time the length of the line shrinks, verbs occur which refer to a process of diminution: ‘‘lost’’ (line ), ‘‘decaying’’ (line ), ‘‘became poore’’ (lines –), ‘‘became . . . thinne’’ (lines –).When the width of the verse line increases, verbs belonging to a semantic field indicating increase and growth are used: ‘‘rise’’ (line ), ‘‘further’’ (line ), ‘‘combine’’ (line ), ‘‘imp’’ (line ), ‘‘advance’’ (line ).This pattern is reinforced by the change of tense occurring in each stanza: past tense in the first half of each stanza, when the lines start to grow shorter: ‘‘createdst’’ (line ), ‘‘lost’’ (line ), ‘‘became’’ (line ), ‘‘did’’ (line ), ‘‘didst’’ (line ), ‘‘became’’ (line ); via present tense when the lines begin to increase in length: ‘‘let’’ (line ), ‘‘sing’’ (line ), ‘‘let’’ (line ), ‘‘feel’’ (line ), ‘‘imp’’ (line ); to the future in the final line of each stanza: ‘‘shall further’’ (line ), ‘‘shall advance’’ (line ). (–) Although van Peer’s essay is illuminating, there are some significant gaps in his argument, which I propose to fill. In the first place, I believe the term ‘‘foregrounding’’ as a wholesale key-term is insufficient for his purpose.One should distinguish degrees of unnaturalness in foregrounding. In poetry, language is foregrounded relative to its nonpoetic use, and in some poetic styles, it is more foregrounded than in others. 756 Poetics Today 21:4 In the second place, his explanation based on the arbitrariness of the graphemic sign is unsatisfactory.The string of phonological signifiers is no less arbitrary with reference to the semantic signifieds than the string of graphemic signifiers is in reference to the phonological signifieds. So we have a whole hierarchy of sign relationships, characterized throughout by arbitrariness. But the arbitrariness of the graphemic sign is somehow different from the arbitrariness of, for example, the phonological sign.Consequently, one should be careful with the argument that ‘‘The founding principle of alphabetic writing is the arbitrary character of the signs used, as a result of which they are more or less void of mimetic meaning, unlike the partial or rudimentary mimesis of ideographic and logographic script’’ (). In Western poetry we deem the patterning of graphemic signifiers (e.g., picture poetry, acrostic) as being more artificial than the patterning of phonological signifiers (e.g., alliteration, rhyme) because we intuitively compare the effects of ‘‘typographic foregrounding’’ in alphabetic script not to its effects in ‘‘ideographic and logographic script’’ but to the effects of phonetic or syntactic or semantic foregrounding.Thus, the explanation becomes the explicandum: we must explain why ‘‘typographic foregrounding’’ displays a more arbitrary character of the signs used than phonetic or syntactic or semantic foregrounding does. In the third place, when van Peer says that ‘‘such ‘concrete’ poems become popular in periods of great social, political and ideological upheaval’’ (), we must remember that such ‘‘typographic foregrounding’’ of poems is typically part of poetic styles usually called ‘‘manneristic’’ or ‘‘metaphysical,’’ and it has been frequently suggested that such styles tend to occur in periods of great social, political, and ideological upheaval (Sypher ; Isaacs ). Similar suggestions have been made about the sociocultural background of the grotesque: ‘‘It is no accident that the grotesque mode in art and literature tends to be prevalent in societies and eras marked by strife, radical change or disorientation’’ (Thomson : ). By this I don’t wish to suggest that van Peer’s suggestion is wrong, but that other issues are involved. In the relation between signifiers and signifieds, many mannerist devices are perceived as being more artificial than their nonmanneristic counterparts, and in this respect ‘‘typographic foregrounding’’ appears to be only one instance of a larger manneristic principle. In other words, we should look for reasons for the uneven distribution of picture poetry in reasons related to the appearance of mannerism, not in radical innovations in writing and printing techniques. Tsur • Picture Poetry, Mannerism, and Sign Relationships 757 Poetic Language and Communicative Competence My three above points may best be accounted for by a set of homogeneous principles derived from the assumption that man is a sign-using animal. Human culture consists of hierarchies and long series of signifiers and signifieds. Humans seem programmed to reach the last link of this chain as fast as possible. Such programming has considerable survival value. If a certain noise is ‘‘a sign of ’’ some predator, knowledge of the predator has greater survival value than knowledge of the noise. However, in a complex cultural situation of human society in which the automatic identification of signifiers with their signifieds may be the source of maladaptive behavior, the signifiers and signifieds must be kept apart. Here is where poetry comes in. ‘‘The function of poetry’’ wrote Roman Jakobson in , ‘‘is to point out that sign is not identical with its referent.’’ Why do we need this reminder? ‘‘Because along with the awareness of the identity of the sign and the referent (A is A1), we need the consciousness of the inadequacy of this identity (A is not A1).’’ And Victor Erlich () says, ‘‘This antinomy is essential since without it the connection between the sign and the object becomes automatical and perception of reality withers away’’ (). In nonpoetic use of language we tend to attend away from the signifier to the signified. In poetic languagewe tend to attend to the signifiersmore than in ordinary, nonpoetic language, where sometimes we remember the information but not the exact words that conveyed it. Poetic language compels us ‘‘to attend back’’ to the signifier or to ever higher signifiers in a hierarchy of signs. Attention shifts from the extralinguistic referent to the verbal (semantic) signifier, from the semantic unit to the string of phonological signifiers—and eventually, perhaps, to the graphic signifier of the phonological unit. The phonetic patterning of poetry (rhyme, meter, alliteration) typically directs some of the attention away from the semantic to the phonological component of language, whereas figurative language (and many other semantic devices) directs attention from the extralinguistic referent to the verbal sign. In this perspective, we might expect to find some patterning of the typographic signifier as well, but it is relatively rare in poetry. This process can be appreciated when it breaks down, as in a riddle. Consider the following riddle, common among children: ‘‘Which cheese is made backward?’’—‘‘Edam.’’ Our linguistic competence requires us to run through the hierarchy of signifiers, from the string of graphemes, through the string of phonemes, the semantic units, down to extralinguistic reality, and look for some odd production processes in the dairy. But the riddle is a riddle, precisely, because, to figure it out, the understander must leave this chain of signifiers—and at some theoretically unspecifiable point, at 758 Poetics Today 21:4 that. In this instance, the exit occurs at the grapheme level: ‘‘edam’’ spelled backward is ‘‘made.’’ If we contrive an admittedly less elegant riddle, ‘‘What matronly woman is made backward?’’, the exit will be at the phonological level of the same chain, the solution being ‘‘dame.’’ We know all about the word ‘‘made’’: we know its spelling, its sound structure, its grammatical form, its meanings, its possible referents in a variety of extralinguistic contexts.We automatically look for an answer in the world of referents. But when we can’t find the answer there, we become aware that this is a riddle, and look for possibilities suggested by other elements of this complex, such as the spelling, even if the riddle is presented orally. In poetic language no exit is forced on the understander: the whole chain of signifiers is realized, but the understander must linger at some of the earlier stages. So far there should be little disagreement between Willie van Peer and myself. But here a further step seems to be required. Because poetic language draws attention to itself more than nonpoetic language, one must make a distinction between its conspicuousness in poetic styles. In nonmanneristic styles such as classic or romantic, the transition from the signifier to the signified is relatively smooth. The phonetic patterns in these styles are perceived as some pleasant fusion of sounds at the back of one’s mind. In manneristic styles such as metaphysical or modernistic, language tends to direct attention back to the signifiers more conspicuously. So in poetic language the duality of signs is more prevalent than it is in nonpoetic language, and within poetic language, we are more aware of their duality in mannerist than in, for example, romantic poetry. In classic or romantic poetry, the incongruity of the sign vehicle and what it signifies is eventually resolved smoothly. However, this is not the case in metaphysical or modernistic poetry. Sypher (: –) speaks of ‘‘Donne’s false and verbal (perhaps false? perhaps verbal?) resolutions—his incapacity to commit himself wholly to any one world or view.The resolution is gained, if at all, only rhetorically, not [through] reason.’’ In a metaphysical pun or conceit there is one sign in which the tenor and the vehicle are both so consistently developed that one is compelled to be aware of both their identity and incongruity. Sometimes this is achieved by assigning an additional sign function to the same signifier. In such an instance, the two meanings are resolved on the verbal level only, whereas the two worlds denoted by them are kept apart, and the reader must commit to the worlds indicated by the two sign functions. The same can be said, mutatis mutandis, of the lines that transmit their message by a string of phonemes, and the visual design of a pair of wings, or an altar, or a wounded dove and a fountain: all are so consistently developed that one is compelled to be aware of both their identity and inconTsur • Picture Poetry, Mannerism, and Sign Relationships 759 gruity. But such rival organizations of typography need not involve some visual design. Much manneristic poetry is distinguished by alternative patterning that became a solid convention: acrostic. In the ‘‘envoi’’ section in some of Villon’s ballades, for example, you may read from left to right for the poetic message or read the first letter of each line from top to bottom to receive the word ‘‘Villon.’’ The word exists only as part of the typographic design of the poem, not in the usual left-to-right direction of the words. It does not contribute to the statements that constitute the poetic message; it tells who wrote it. Vous portastes, digne Vierge, princesse, Iesus regnant qui n’a ne fin ne cesse, Le Tout Puissant, prenant nostre foiblesse, Laissa les cieulx et nous vint secourir, Offrit a mort sa tres chiere jeunesse; Nostre Seigneur tel est, tel le confesse: En ceste foy je vueil vivre et mourir. ‘‘Ballade pour prier Nostre Dame’’