Trapped in language: aspects of ambiguity and intertextuality in selected poetry and prose by Sylvia Plath - Critical Essay

Style, Spring, 2002 by Andrea Gerbig, Anja Muller-Wood

Thus Plath's skillful positioning of rare terms in her poetry and prose, by way of directing the interpretive maneuvers of her readers, immediately undercuts the aim of this strategy. It is the ambiguity underlying intertextuality that characterizes Plath's use of the word "spikes" and, in another example for intertextual duplicity in 'The Rabbit Catcher," the phrase "extreme unction." "Extreme unction" is the archaic term for the last of the seven sacraments given to a dying person and has today been replaced by the more frequently used "anointment." An investigation of the CobuildDirect and the British National Corpus, (7) as well as an internet search facility, FAST, (8) which accesses 200 million documents on the internet, illustrates how rare the term is. CobuildDirect provides only eleven occurrences of "unction," five of which are in the phrase "extreme unction." These occur in historical and literary sources only . (9) This rare term invests the poem with a note of religiosity and, together with such lexical choices as "malignity," "spikes," and "torture," contributes to the poem's overall associations with pain and death. While the term "extreme unction" may seem unusual in the context of the poem's very personal concerns, it emphasizes the suffering of the lyrical "I."

But the term is not only rare, it is also ambiguous. Like "spikes," it slides between the contexts on which it touches, defying a homogeneous effect. For a contemporary reader of the poem, the adjective "extreme" fits in the semantic field of violence. As a shaping part of the phrase "extreme unction," it reverberates with notions of excess that are taken up at other points in the poem. This is illustrated by the "prototypical" (in CobuildDirect, frequent, statistically relevant) adjectival collocation . In other, more neutral uses, "extreme" serves to express spatial or temporal orientation, e.g., , . It is in this temporal sense of a life coming to a merciful end that the term "extreme unction" can also be understood. The construction is based on a conjunction of death and relief that ultimately lends it a positive quality. This positive evaluation is emphasized also by other words used in the p oem, such as "efficiency," "great beauty," and, in part, "extravagant." The ensuing lexical tension of positive and negative, violence and beauty, begs the question of what the possible pragmatic effect is for the reader. "Great beauty" surely is a positive evaluation. But both "efficiency" and "extravagant" occur in mixed collocations. The corpora reveal that "extravagant" is mainly viewed negatively, often with an undertone of the socially unacceptable. Analysis of the larger co-texts in which the term appears suggests, however, that, extravagance is not only a target of social criticism, but can be admired, appreciated, and desired. In any case, "extravagant" never occurred with such violent collocations as the "torture" alongside which Plath places it.

Like "extravagant," "efficiency," while conventionally positively collocated, offers examples in the corpus data invoking xenophobic stereotypes, e.g., . Significantly, Plath has recourse to precisely this xenophobia in the remarks about language scattered throughout her writing. The spikes of the gorse, after all, recall the "dense, black, barbed-wire letters" that for Esther Greenwood, in The Bell Jar, characterize the German language and that, insurmountable, incomprehensible, "made my mind shut like a clam" (34). (10) For Esther, here, "German" is coterminous with violence. It is also depicted as preventing rather than fostering communication. In a journal entry regarding prose, Plath uses a similar lexical combination: "Prose writing has become a phobia to me: my mind shuts & I clench. I can't, or won't, come clear with a plot" (403). But the theme of closure and the prevention of communication likewise characterizes Plath's statements about poetic language. Highly skeptical even of po etry, Plath formulated distinctions between poetry and prose resembling those of contemporary linguists compiling corpora. Indeed, our corpora rarely draw on examples from poetry, probably because it is not regarded as belonging to the core of "ordinary" language use (see Sinclair, "Corpus Typology"): poetry is "skewed." Plath, in an essay in Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams, puts it as follows: