Philip Larkin: the Metonymic Muse

Abstract

1930s writing was, characteristically, antimodernist, realistic, readerly and metonymic. In the 1940s the pendulum of literary fashion swung back again — not fully, but to a perceptible degree — towards the pole we have designated as modernist, symbolist, writerly and metaphoric. Sooner or later the leading writers of the 1930s became disillusioned with politics, lost faith in Soviet Russia, took up religion, emigrated to America and fell silent. Christianity, in a very uncompromising, antihumanist, theologically ‘high’ form, became a force in literature (the later Eliot, the Charles Williams-C. S. Lewis circle, the ‘Catholic novel’ of Greene and Waugh). Bourgeois writers no longer felt obliged to identify with the proletariat. Bohemian, patrician, cosmopolitan attitudes and life-styles became once more acceptable in the literary world. To say that the English novel resumed experimentalism would be an overstatement; but ‘fine writing’ certainly returned and an interest in rendering the refinements of individual sensibility rather than collective experience. There was a revival of Henry James, and many people saw Charles Morgan as his modern successor. Fantasy, such as Upward and Isherwood had felt obliged to purge from their work, was luxuriated in by Mervyn Peake.

What follows is a chapter from my book, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy and the Typology of Modern Literature (London: Edward Arnold, 1977; New York: Cornell University Press, 1977), and a word of explanation about the theory on which it is based may be appropriate.

In the concluding pages of his paper entitled ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’ (Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle, Fundamentals of Language [The Hague, 1956]), Roman Jakobson, one of the founding fathers of Structuralism, expounded a distinction between metaphor and metonymy as the two ‘poles’ of all discourse. Language, like any system of signs, has a twofold character, involving two distinct operations, selection and combination. To produce a sentence like ‘ships crossed the sea’ (the example is my own, not Jakobson’s) I select the words I need from the paradigms of the English language and combine them according to the rules of that language (subject-verb-object). If I substitute ‘ploughed’ for ‘crossed’, I create a metaphor based on a perceived similarity between two things otherwise different — the movement of a ship through water and the movement of a plough through the earth. If I substitute ‘keels’ for ‘ships’, I have used the figure of synecdoche (part standing for whole, or whole for part). If I substitute ‘deep’ for ‘sea’, I have used the figure of metonymy (an attribute or cause or effect of a thing standing for the thing itself). According to Jakobson, synecdoche is a subspecies of metonymy, since both are derived from contiguity and the combination axis of language, in contrast to metaphor, which derives from similarity and the selection axis. Jakobson takes these two rhetorical figures as models of the way whole discourses are constructed:

The development of a discourse may take place along two different semantic lines: one topic may lead to another either through their similarity or their contiguity. The metaphorical way would be the more appropriate term for the first case, and the metonymic for the second, since they find their most condensed expression in metaphor and metonymy respectively. … In normal verbal behaviour both processes are continually operative, but careful observation will reveal that under the influence of a cultural pattern, personality, and verbal style, preference is given to one of the two processes over the other (p. 76)