A State Destroys a Noun: Charles Olson and Objectism

Abstract

In an unpublished prose typescript from 1963 (figure 2), drawing on a footnote in Eric A. Havelock’s Preface to Plato, Charles Olson made the following cryptic observation regarding the ill effects of abstract reasoning on language:

A “State” destroys a noun, and you can do it in three ways: you can suffix it to death (-ness), you can strain it as a word to cover more than it means, or to ask more of it, and it breaks down because it does have an order of its own, or you can invade the meaning, and life within and of a noun, the life of a noun, simply by smothering it with a neuter singular, which in fact is only a third of the third person singular, and a pronoun if it is excused at all and as such only standing in for der heilige ghost, and not a person has yet been seen who has seen a neuter singular walking p (Critical Lesson One, as of the Destruction of the Noun by exactly Three Means Sometime Between 700 BC and altogether Successfully by 400 BC, and Thus Persisting Successfully into the Present, evidence drawn in above directly from Eric Havelock’s footnote Number 23, page 178 of Preface to Plato, and Anticipating of His Further Work on This Point …) (Storrs, “A ‘State’ Destroys a Noun”)

Socrates: And speech is a kind of action?

Hermogenes: True.

Socrates: And will a man speak correctly who speaks as he pleases? Will not the successful speaker rather be he who speaks in the natural way of speaking, and as things ought to be spoken, and with the natural instrument? Any other mode of speaking will result in error and failure.

Plato, Cratylus, 387b–c

[B]y going in further to the word as meaning and thing, and, mixing the governing human title and experience (which prompts him to bother with words at all), his effect is the equivalent of his act: the power… suddenly moves as one has known it does of its own nature, without using any means or matter other than those local and implicit to it. It is molecular, how this power is, why it all multiplies from itself and from the element proper to its being. We are in the presence of the only truth which the real can have.

Charles Olson, “Quantity in Verse, and Shakespeare’s Late Plays”