"Terrible simplicity": Emerson's metaleptic style - 19th-century poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson

Style, Spring, 1997 by Eric Wilson

In its most shocking moment, the eye of the passage begins with the participial phrase "Standing on the bare ground." The phrase conceptually and syntactically "rhymes" with the liminal opening phrase of the passage, "Crossing a bare common." The "off-rhyme" of these phrases signals the Visionary's move from the liminal into the world of Universal Being, the sublime. Between the time the Visionary crosses the common and finds himself standing on bare ground, he, like Dante's Pilgrim, has crossed Lethe and Eunoe and entered into earthly paradise, the realm where one is prepared for a vision of the absolute. The "bare ground" is yet another in a series of sylleptic puns: it is literally the winter earth, but also the absolute foundation, the basis underlying everything. Emerson has troped the "bare common" into the site where the universal principle of life will emerge in a sublime moment. Moreover, "ground" is a primary term used in speaking of electricity. A ground is a large conducting body, such as the earth, whose potential or voltage is zero. "Ground" also refers to an electric circuit connected to the earth and thus grounded, or rendered impotent. The ground, like the Visionary, is still, empty, waiting to be filled and charged by Being. Contained in a participial phrase modifying a subject, this sylleptic figure will operate on a noun by metaphorically "grounding" it, emptying it of voltage.

But Emerson provides no subject. Bloom has rightly called this passage a "triumph of the Negative Way" (Agon 30), as the Visionary empties himself of selfhood to become one with the primal Abyss. The "I" in the opening sentence of the passage is lost, as Emerson uses the figure of anacoluthon, a mode of expression that, because the writer or speaker changes constructions mid-sentence, leaves its beginning uncompleted. Quite simply, Emerson employs a dangling modifier, as "Standing on the bare ground" clearly should refer to an absent "I," not "egotism." This change suggests that the speaker has lost his particularity and become one with the universal principle. Metaleptically, syllepsis indirectly tropes the absent speaker into an electric circuit whose energy has merged with the earth's, a circuit empty of its own energy.

Alternatively, one could surmise that "Standing on the bare ground" modifies "head." This would do away with anacoluthon and present a catachretic metaphor in which a head "stands." This alternative holds as well. "Head" is a metaleptic site, compressing metonymy, synecdoche, and metaphor. "Head" is a metonymy for mind. Or, it could be read as a whole substituted for the part of the eye, as the head will be metaphorized into an eye in the next sentence. Yet further, if "head" is interpreted as the subject of the sentence, then it is metaphorized into a circuit grounded in the earth. Emerson's grammar is in conflict with itself. The reader is caught between two possibilities, each of which is equally valid. Like the Visionary, the reader is placed in a liminal state, on the verge of transcendence, at the brink of creation.