"What Is This Thing Called Love?": Cole Porter and the Rhythms of Desire - Critical Essay

Criticism, Wntr, 1999 by Ronald Schleifer

As well as describing these categories in relation to linguistic structure and abnormal language performance, Jakobson also aligns the opposition of metaphor and metonymy with the "condensation" and "displacements" of meanings Freud describes in dream work.(10) Following Jakobson in rereading Freudian psychoanalysis, Lacan emphasizes the temporal as well as spatial extensions of metonymic figures and argues that desire is metonymic insofar as it repeatedly pursues what it cannot achieve. "Metonymy," Lacan writes, "is ... the effect made possible by the fact that there is no signification that does not refer to another signification, and in which their common denominator is produced, namely the little meaning (frequently confused with the insignificant), the little meaning, I say, that proves to lie at the basis of the desire."(11) For Lacan desire is metonymic precisely in the multitudinousness of its articulations rather than the absoluteness of its meaning. Desire inhabits the accidental world of time and space, the arbitrariness of signifiers referring to other signifiers with no seeming resting place. In other words, metonymy inhabits the ambiguous borderline between sense and meaning, things and discourse. Thus Lacan writes: "Impediment, failure, split. In a spoken or a written sentence something stumbles. Freud is attracted by these phenomena, and it is there that he seeks the unconscious. There something other demands to be realized--which appears as intentional, of course, but of a strange temporality."(12) Such stumbling is syncopation, and such temporality is metonymic, the rhythms of desire that give rise to "the little meaning," which is a "meaning" the signifier of which is the relentless pursuit of signifiers across things. Such a pursuit never quite "signifies"--it never results in, even momentarily, an anchored meaning--even while it does provoke responses to its fruitless pursuit: free-floating anxiety, a haunting sense of something missing, restless desire, that constantly seem to verge on meaning. Lacan attempts to describe this ambiguous operation in an important essay, aptly entitled "The Freudian Thing."(13)

An extreme example of the restlessness of metonymy is Porter's song, "It's De-Lovely" (1936), which can help us to understand the spatial and, indeed, the temporal nature of metonymy. In that song the repeated line, "It's delightful, it's delicious, it's de-lovely" (143), defines the song title's neologism simply by the contiguity of the syllable /de/ of the adjectives. At the end of the first refrain this line is "exploded" into a longer list of adjectives beginning with/de/: "it's delightful, it's delicious, / It's delectable, it's delirious, / It's dilemma, it's delimit, it's deluxe, it's de-lovely." In the second refrain this "explosion" is no longer of real adjectives beginning with/de/but rather with parallels to the word "divine"--that is, with the sounds /de/ /v/. Porter writes: "It's divine, dear, it's diveen, dear, / It's de-wunderbar, it's de victory, / It's de vallop, it's de vinner, it's de yolks, it's de-lovely." Porter, here and elsewhere, is shifting the focus from the signifieds of language to the signifiers, in this case the morphemic sounds rather than the meaning. The displacement from major to minor, as the lyrics in "Ev'ry Time We Say Goodbye" notes, enacts a similar change in focus, by directing attention from the meaning of the words to the qualities of the sounds. And when, at the end of the verses of "What Is This Thing Called Love?" (1929), the implicit mode of C minor is displaced by C major, Porter is making the formal signifiers of music do the work of the semantics of his lyrics.