The Locus of Meaning: Six Hyperdimensional Fictions 9781487584641

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The Locus of Meaning Six Hyperdimensional Fictions

THEORY/CULTURE Editors: Linda Hutcheon, Gary Leonard Janet Paterson, and Paul Perron

The Locus of Meaning Six Hyperdilllensional Fictions

HERBERT F. SMITH UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 1994 Reprinted in 2018 Toronto Buffalo London Printed in Canada ISBN 0-802~571 l-X ISBN 978-1-4875-7314-0 (paper)

Printed on acid-free paper

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data Smith, Herbert F. (Herbert Franklin), 193~ The locus of meaning : six hyperdimensional fictions (Theory/ culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-802~5711-X 1. Structuralism (Literary analysis). 2. American fiction - 19th century- History and criticism. 3. American fiction - 20th century- History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series.

PN98. S7S551994 801'.953 C93-095449-1

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

To my wife, Virginia, my son Geoffrey, and the memury of our beluved Alyson

Contents

Axiomatic (to take the place of a foreword) xiii PART ONE: A Theory of Hyperdimensional Isomorphisms 1. Topological Isomorphisms in Semiotic Analysis 3

2. Metaphor and Metonymy Revisited 20 3. Towards an Integrated Theory of Style 50 PART TWO: Three Nineteenth-Century Texts

4. Arthur Gordon Pym in Five Barthesian Dimensions 71 5. The Confidence-Man: An Epimenidean View 87 6. Raising the Consciousness of A Connecticut Yankee 104 PART THREE: Three Postmodern Texts

7. The Lemniscate Topology of Pak Fire 123 8. 0°/Chaos = Chimera, the Novel 139 9. Integrating Chaos: The Crying of Lot 49 155 Epilogue 171 Bibliographical Notes 177 Index 187

Acknowledgments

Any work that has been in progress for some ten years, like this one, leaves behind a trail of contributing suggestions, hints, ideas adopted, ideas considered then amended, even ideas so far out that they seem from a different species, yet have affected this text. I have been particularly fortunate in the many friends and colleagues who have aided and abetted me in the development of this text. Some come to mind easily: the readers for the two journals who pu_blished earlier versions of chapters I and 4: John Cassidy of Language and Styl.e and Linda Hutcheon for English Studies in Canada (Linda, obviously, for many other reasons as well); conference organizers (like Mirko Jurak) and participants (like Ryan Bishop) who read or listened to versions of various chapters and commented constructively; John Barth for reading (with some amusement and some pleasure, I hope) the chapter on him and N. Katherine Hayles for much more than reading the chapter on Pynchon - but for that, too, certainly; colleagues with congruent interests who suffered obsessive conversations with me Tom Cleary on quincunxes, Evelyn Cobley and Steve Scobie on theory, Mert Sealts on Melville, Alex Liddie on just about everything; the anonymous readers for University of Toronto Press and for SSHRC who were willing to take a chance on a work that deviates from the academic norm; the editors at University of Toronto Press, especially Laura Macleod and Ken Lewis, who bore the brunt of the typographic irregularities and interdisciplinary lnicolage of all sorts contained herein; Lawrence Henderson, who did many of the graphics. All these people and many others _contributed to what is good about this text; I of course take full responsibility for what is lacking in it.

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Acknowledgments

I also wish to thank the Collection Haags Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, for permission to publish M.C. Escher's Liberation. The sunflower design on the title and part-title pages of this volume originally appeared in H.E. Huntley's The Divine Propartion: A Study in Mathematical Beauty (New York: Dover 1970).

L'artiste, l'analyste refait le chemin du sens, ii n'a pas a le designer: sa fonction , pour reprendre l'exemple de Hegel, est une manteia; comme le devin antique, ii dit le lieu du sens mais ne le nomme pas. Roland Barthes, ' L'Activite structuraliste'

[Every Schoolboy Knows ... ] THE DMSION OF THE PERCEIVED UNIVERSE INTO PARTS AND WHOLES IS CONVENIENT AND MAY BE NECESSARY, BUT NO NECESSITY DETERMINES HOW IT SHALL BE DONE.

Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature

Did we say that literature is entirely involved with language, is merely the permutation of a restricted number of elements and functions? But is the tension in literature not continually striving to escape from this finite number? Does it not continually attempt to say something it cannot say, something that it does not know, and that no one could ever know? A thing cannot be known when the words and concepts used to say it and think it have not yet been used in that position, not yet arranged in that order, with that meaning. The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary. ltalo Calvino, 'Cybernetics and Ghosts'

'You don't see something until you have the right metaphor to let you perceive it.' Robert Shaw to James Gleick

Hamlet. Do you see yonder cloud that's almost in shape of a camel? Pownius. By the mass, and 'tis like a camel, indeed. Hamlet. Methinks it is like a weasel. Pownius. It is backed like a weasel. Hamlet. Or like a whale? Pownius. Very like a whale.

Axiomatic ( to take the place of a foreword)

In a sense, this book began when I was in grade ten and first encountered plane geometry. I had had some trouble in my first encounter with algebra the year before, partly because of the onset of puberty, partly because of a personality conflict with my math teacher, but when I discovered that the figures and constructions of plane geometry made pictures of the abstractions of algebra, it all began to come clear to me. That number and relationship can be illustrated by quantity, area, volume, and shape seemed to me then - and still does - a remarkable aid to understanding. Indeed, I began to believe, and have never given up the notion entirely, that a concept, no matter how abstract, is not really understood unless it can generate some sort of picture in the mind. I made it through grade ten and went on to become a professor of English, but that one insight from plane geometry stayed with me. As time went on, it seemed to increase in importance. I found in my teaching that I was drawing more and more diagrams and that these diagrams were leading me to conclusions about the nature of literature and literary criticism that were often not generally shared by my colleagues. In particular, I found the idea that a literary work created a wcus of meaning, rather than a specific meaning, was a most useful critical tool. Locus (Latin for 'place,' correspondent to the Greek topos), as used in geometry, describes all of the points that satisfy a given relationship (as the locus of points equidistant from a single point describes a circle). To look at literature that way seems to me more satisfying than to attempt to name all those points - or worse, to name one and try to convince the world it is the only one.

xiv

Axiomatic (to take the place ofa foreword)

Then, in 1963, I took a Fulbright professorship at the Universite d'Aix-Marseilles and, during the course of that year, but especially at a 'reunion des anglicistes' held in the spring of 1964 at Pau, discovered that a whole group of structuralist critics were creating a framework for what I had been doing on my own. Indeed, one of them, Roland Barthes, in his Essais critiques, had even made precisely the distinction I had long felt about the locus of meaning and had described it as the essential critical duty. I came back to North America feeling completely justified in continuing to play with my spatial isomorphisms. 1 (Yes, I had by then discovered that very useful word.) I began reading the basic structuralist texts: Peirce, Saussure, Jakobson, Levi-Strauss. As my structuralist thinking became more generalized, I read the other eclectics who were moving isomorphically among disparate disciplines: Gregory Bateson, Michael Thompson, Douglas Hofstadter, Dean MacCannell. 2 Then, about ten years ago, a whole series of loose ends of strings I had been pulling randomly for some time began to come together in a web of meaning. At the centre of things was the verb to be as = sign and the resultant confusion between metonymy and metaphor. Try as I might, I could not generate a satisfactory isomorphism that consistently worked as a 'picture' ofjakobson's distinction between the metaphoric and the metonymic. I was stuck on the neatness of the ratio digi,tal : anawgue :: metonymy : metaph