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

But the rigid distinction between the closed fist of poetry and the open hand of prose is challenged by the historical dimension of these images, which have a longstanding tradition in the metadiscourse on language and literature. Early modern professional users of language, sensitive to the point of anxiety about the question of their social significance and value outside the context of patronage, used similar dualisms to illustrate the linguistic mediation of meaning. Closed fist and open hand served to differentiate logic and rhetoric, the former, as W. S. Howell suggests, associated with the "tight discourses of the philosopher," the latter "with the more open discourses of orator and popularizer" (4). That both fields are of equal significance to early modern theories of communication is suggested by how the same image serves to characterize either discipline. In the humanist trivium, rhetoric occupied the place of a mediator of knowledge. But although early modern culture could therefore see rhetoric in didactic and prudential terms, it was simultaneously highly skeptical of the persuasive intent of the rhetorician (see, for example, Kahn; Rhodes; Vickers). Whether Plath knew about the use of such imagery in the early modern period is impossible to determine, but even if this possible intertextual link is only speculative, it opens up a larger literary context that emphasizes the very historicity of Plath's position. Her democratic ideal of the open, communicative nature of prose has its roots in the far more complex view bestowed upon rhetoric in the past. The historical perspective not only illuminates how ideas develop and change; it also suggests that the problem addressed by Plath is not one of genre but of language in general, because language, despite all conventional disambiguation, always retains its fundamental potential for ambiguity.

Plath's intertextual allusions in "The Rabbit Catcher" confirm that she herself is able to use this ambiguity creatively. The manipulation of language patterns is "art's privilege," as Widdowson writes: "It is just this kind of resolution of disparity by invoking congruence of a different order which gives verbal art, and indeed all art, its essential significance" (23). For Jean-Jacques Lecercle, the breaking of linguistic frontiers is one of the operations of ordinary language use, which does not hamper or prevent the translation of meaning or communication: "An 'exception' does not make the rule it breaks invalid, it just breaches the frontier it marks. And beyond the frontier [. . .] there lies not the outer darkness of linguistic darkness, but language that is still intelligible" (23). Linguistic frontiers, in other words, are "nomadic" (25). Kristeva sees in the capacity to transgress these frontiers, to play with and change language, the subject's scope for enjoyment (29). Plath's statements on poetry, while dismissive of linguistic creativity, point to her own involvement in this enjoyment as it becomes visible in her own manipulations of language.