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

Twentieth Century Literature, Fall, 2004 by Jon Kertzer

The hapaxlegomenon is performative--a self-creating word--but as Zailig Pollock shows in his commentary on Klein, it must also be self-destructive if it can be performed only once. There is a demonic parody of the hapaxlegomenon in the death sentence: the irrevocable word that hangs over us all and that, for Klein, finds its worst exclamation as a nuclear explosion or the Holocaust (Pollock 207-08).

Both genesis and death decree, the singular word is ascribed an uncanny power exerted at either the very beginning or the very end of things. Or more correctly, it offers a way of imagining how beginnings begin and where endings end. Because of its proximity to creation and destruction, it is too dangerous to touch. Anne Carson asks why neologisms should be so disturbing, and answers:

     If we cannot construe them at all, we call them mad. If we can
     construe them, they raise troubling questions about our own
     linguistic mastery. We say "coinages" because they disrupt the
     economic equilibrium of words and things that we had prided
     ourselves on maintaining. A new compound word in [Paul] Celan, for
     example, evokes something that now suddenly seems real, although
     it didn't exist before and is attainable through this word alone.
     It comes to us free, like a piece of new air. And (like praise) it
     has to prepare for itself an ear to hear it, just slightly before
     it arrives--has to invent its own necessity. (134)

A neologism has to prepare for its own coming; otherwise it cannot be received intelligibly at all. "Coinage" suggests a fresh minting of meaning, but the image is wonderfully inappropriate, since singularities are not commensurate with other things and therefore cannot be exchanged for them. Their value is not economic but inspirational, as Klein shows. Perhaps that is why both poets immediately associate the creative burst of language with praise, but also with irrationality.

The same is true of my third example, catachresis, which is the other side of the coin. If neologisms upset the equilibrium of words and things, and the hapaxlegomenon is a word without a thing, then catachresis is a thing without a word. Also known as abusio, it is a strained metaphor ("take up arms against a sea of troubles") but is also used to point at something with no proper name of its own. Common examples are table leg, book leaf, and mother tongue. Here again, the verbal economy is disrupted by an odd performance. In most metaphors one term is substituted for another, but there can be no substitution of a figurative word for a literal one if the literal one does not exist. Instead, we have what the witches in Macbeth ominously call "A deed without a name" (4.1.49). In the heyday of deconstruction, catachresis was regarded as the abusive rhetorical deed par excellence. Jacques Derrida treats it as the way language strains between sense and reference (59-60); J. Hillis Miller sees it as a primal misnaming that lurks in all words (19-20); de Man calls it "[t]he trope which coins a name for the still-unnamed entity, which gives face to the faceless" ("Lyrical Voice" 57), and he warns: