The course of a particular: on the ethics of literary singularity

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2004 by Jon Kertzer

The deictic this recalls the insistent gesture concluding Stevens's poem "The Man on the Dump": "Where was it one first heard of the truth? The the" (Palm 164). This poem drastically shrinks its focus until it points not at the thing itself but at the verbal function (the definite article) through which things are specified. Here is an act of specifying without content. Another, less esoteric example of definition through insistence appears in Martin Amis's enthusiastic praise for Philip Roth: "There aren't supposed to be degrees or intensities of uniqueness, and yet Roth is somehow inordinately unique. He is bloodymindedly himself, himself, himself" (290). Amis makes a show of defying logic by placing Roth in a class by himself. If his peculiar style pervades his writing, then it is recognizable for being repeated, but that repetition is traced back to a unique source--presumably Roth's creative personality--which cannot be named, only circled relentlessly and marked out by that circling. These examples suggest that the rhetoric of singularity is positional and indicative; that is, it seeks ways of pointing from a distance at an untouchable source--the rose itself, the unique personality, the the.

Another gestural tactic is the hapaxlegomenon, a word that appears only once in a document or corpus, such as a neologism or unrecognizable word. Whereas Stevens resorts to the definite article, a word so common that it has no meaning of its own, other writers imagine words that can be used only once. In practice, a word that is truly unrepeated or unrepeatable would be incomprehensible. Iterability makes words both intelligible and ambiguous, because they can only be understood when they are used and shared, yet reiteration also makes them constantly change their meaning in new contexts. If they were never repeated, they might seem frozen at the moment of utterance, pure but without resonance. A. M. Klein uses the Hebrew form millot bodedot ("words alone," corresponding to "hapax legomena") to evoke this magical insularity:

     Isolated words. Lonesome words. They occur but once in the whole
     Torah, and are related to no other word. In English, or rather in
     Greek, they are called hapaxlegomena, words of single occurrence.
     Once, only once, do they appear in the Bible, and then are not
     heard from again. (Notebooks 131)

Even to cite a hapaxlegomenon is, perversely, to destroy it by using it a second time, thus converting it into common currency. Instead, Klein accords exclusive value to the word of single occurrence by identifying it with God's divine fiat--"let there be light"--a genesis that occurs only once. The poet imitates this creative moment by "uttering" a fictional world, and Klein's eloquent example from "A Portrait of the Poet as Landscape" illustrates how quickly the single utterance proliferates into a fantasia of correspondences:

                   Look, he is
     the nth Adam taking a green inventory
     in world by scarcely uttered, naming praising,
     the flowering fiats in the meadow, the
     syllabled fur, stars aspirate, the pollen
     whose sweet collision sounds eternally. (Poems 638-39)