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Sound and sense
Deciding which sub-plot to put with which main plot must be like deciding what order to put the turns in at a music hall, a form of creative work on which I know of no critical dissertation, but at which one may succeed or fail.
In a bar recently I took part in a conversation about the Gilbert O’Sullivan song “Alone Again (Naturally).” Two of those present thought it was pretty and charming, while another could only see it as unsalvageable cheese. Asked to expand on this point, the latter veered into formal complaints: chiefly the inappropriateness with which it combines a melancholy narrative with light, almost wistful music. This made me think of the famous lines from Pope’s “Essay on Criticism”:
True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
‘Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense:
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar
I neglected to quote this exactly, but I did attempt to inquire about the validity of this classical tenet (a Horatian harmony of form and content). Samuel Johnson prudently (or maybe prudishly) questions it:
This notion of representative metre, and the desire of discovering frequent adaptations of the sound to the sense, have produced, in my opinion, many wild conceits and imaginary beauties. All that can furnish this representation are the sounds of the words considered singly, and the time in which they are pronounced. Every language has some words framed to exhibit the noises which they express, as thump, rattle, growl, hiss. These, however, are but few, and the poet cannot make them more, nor can they be of any use but when sound is to be mentioned.
So really nothing more than that — which we were told in eighth-grade English is called “onomatopoeia”? He continues,
The time of pronunciation was in the dactylick measures of the learned languages capable of considerable variety; but that variety could be accommodated only to motion or duration, and different degrees of motion were perhaps expressed by verses rapid or slow, without much attention of the writer, when the image had full possession of his fancy: but our language having little flexibility our verses can differ very little in their cadence. The fancied resemblances, I fear, arise sometimes merely from the ambiguity of words; there is supposed to be some relation between a soft line and a soft couch, or between hard syllables and hard fortune. ... Motion, however, may be in some sort exemplified; and yet it may be suspected that even in such resemblances the mind often governs the ear, and the sounds are estimated by their meaning. ... Beauties of this kind are commonly fancied; and when real are technical and nugatory, not to be rejected and not to be solicited.
At which point he offers a syllabic comparison of two stanzas with similar rhythmic structure and very different matter, and finds that their effect is derived from the meaning, and the perception of the rhythm is mostly an illusion that follows from it. I.A. Richards also inveighs on this point in Practical Criticism, making a parallel of Milton’s “On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity” with Lewis Carroll-esque gibberish that has an approximate aural equivalence. Which shows, he claims, that there is no internal value to the sound itself, but then claims (in what seems to me a rather unfinished manner) that it has value only insofar as it interacts with the meaning.
But what is the nature of that interaction? This seems a central, very significant point that has received insufficient attention. I see how it’s difficult: at once it seems clear that it is not quite so illusory as Johnson suggests — the nature of poetry as it has always been understood requires there be some correlative force in the working of the sound — but certainly not as direct as Pope makes out. What makes it especially hard to break down is the fact that the response to poems is so varied — it’s hard to establish a control — and that it seems intuitive that successful artists use the combination of sound and sense in a variety of ways: intensification, counterpoint, diffusion, etc. But the closer a point one tries to put on the interaction, the more an individual effect it seems to become. The number of ways to effectively attach a sound to a sense multiplies to equal every individual instance.
And their spectrum would not seem to be as regular as the interior relation of musical intervals: it reminds me more of something as vague and intuitive as Empson’s turns in a music hall, or as strange and medieval as pairing a typeface with its text. Michael Bierut, in the Design Observer essay Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Typeface, asks why particular typefaces work for particular subjects, and presents a variety reasons which often take such adjacent forms of “Because it’s beautiful” and “Because it’s ugly” — reasons that are bound close enough to their contexts that an attempt to summarize their generalizations contributes only iterated contradictions. Does this suggest that specific analysis is the only approach capable of illuminating this relationship — and that attempts, like Pope’s or Johnson’s, to survey it more abstractly are doomed to be frictionless or disembodied?