Metaforic si metonimic: o tipologie a poeziei

Abstract

Nicolau reviews Metagoric si metonimic: o tipologie a poeziei by Iulia Militaru.

Iulia MILITARU, Metaforic si metonimic: o tipologie a poeziei, Iasi, Editura Timpul, 2011, 120 p.

To write a typology of poetry nowadays and to do it attractively is an achievement less probable than unearthing a coloured picture of Shakespeare.

But look, Iulia Militaru succeeds in doing this, grounding her deed on the completely unopposed categories of metaphor and metonymy. By scanning the lyrical genre, she draws courageous conclusions, which every keen reader has already imagined, but that many cultural sultans prefer to ignore. The vector-question targets the relationship between poetry and prose, as different types of discourse. Effectively speaking, the theorist's method is to dwell upon famous remarks or theories. Later on she dissects them, wringing out every formerly skipped conclusion, or she simply contradicts them. This is a deconstruction of theorizing upon a genre in comparison with another genre, the epic one. When Nicolae Manolescu and Michael Riffaterre perceive a poem as an extended metaphor, free of any mimetic obligations, they come in the wake of the duality of language, as it was analysed by Roman Jakobson who, in his turn, followed in the Ferdinand de Saussure's footsteps. When Jakobson organized language along the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes and, subsequently, traced the perturbations of similarity and contiguity, he also mapped the realms of metaphor and of metonymy. Iulia Militaru "de-maps" them by throwing the discussion into the abyss: she chooses to debate processes and phenomena, not only figures of speech as deviations from the zero degree of écriture. Thus, the metonymy is taken to a tridimensional level where it becomes a metonymical process. Jakobson only built his theory having as a point of reference the aphasic persons, the ones who do not preserve the connectors inside a sentence. In this way, a telegraphic style is obtained, a style which makes almost impossible the referent and constitutes a first step towards metaphor, towards poetry. The theorist refuses to accept that prose, too, can organize its discourse in function of a combinatorial, metonymic process. Or, in case she admits overlappings inside a genre, these must fall into sub-genres: for instance, the metonymic poetry and the metaphoric one. The dichotomy is inextricable.

The authoress continues her scrimmage with the classics of literary theory amending Riffaterre's considerations, as he used to analyse a poem independent of any refere nce in reality. Iulia Militaru remarks that a text develops its own referential system, be it an intratextual one. In this way, a lot of texts whose referential function has got altered as a side-effect of their meaning are recovered from the full of "absurdities" attic. The merit is that we are not abandoned in a never-ending conceptual field, as the writer lures us with examples selected from the Romanian and universal poetry. An accomplished connoisseur of English, the researcher resorts to literary and theoretical texts that I have rarely seen grouped shoulder to shoulder.

The more or less fortuitous points on the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes are contested a second before we may grow content that the masters need only some corrections, not a complete overthrowing. Roman Ingarden's rigid chart is shaken by the theory of the indetermination areas. As Wolfgang Iser notices, these air-pockets are surreptitiously inserted in the structure by the authors themselves, but other times they appear surprisingly, without playing a conscious role in the development of interpretation. As regards the metaphoric void, Iulia Militaru nimbly specifies that while in the spoken language metaphor is used to clarify abstract notions, in poetry the situation is reversed - the metaphor obliterates the referent. At a preliminary evaluation, poetry would be a discourse that is not preoccupied with making communication more fluid. At a second thought, though, poetry is split into two types of discourse, depending on the degree of communicability. The former preserves unaltered the function of communication, while the latter organizes the discourse through a metaphorical process (deregulating the combination) or through a metonymical one (deregulating the selection). But the parallelism is unstable, because while Paul Ricoeur promotes the metaphor from the level of a rhetorical trope to the one of constitutive element of the discourse, the metonymy has been kept in an inferior position. It is here that we should spot the researcher's contribution: she admits a process of building the discourse based on the law of contiguity.

The telegraphic style as a prompt for poetry is exemplified with fragments from Bacovia's Bourgeois Stanzas ['Stante burgheze']. The poem as a metaphor, oscillating between an update of reality and a fortification of possible worlds, is valuable - as Theodor Adorno remarked - as long as its meaning keeps being renewable, surpassing, thus, its author's intentions. Quickly enough, the theorist intervenes again with her subtle scalpel: the problem of contemporary art would not be the visibility of the meaning, but the uncontrollable proliferation of signification. Or, in Stefan Lupascu's terms, the work as a system extracts its vitality from a dialectics without synthesis. So, the logic of aesthetics is a contradictory one. The criteria of assessing the logical validity of a statement, its truthfulness, are completely irrelevant in the artistic field - the only one where somebody has the right to contradict herself without being condemned. It is all profitable to read this acute literary theory volume which pleads for liberty as an incentive for the maximum creativity, be it minutely organized.