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Literal Symbol: Jackstraws by Charles Simic  and  On Being a Firefighter

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            I find Charles Simic among the most satisfying reads in contemporary poetry. The thing about Simic seems to be that you both know and don’t know what you are going to get. You know you will be reading short, surreal lyrics in simple language but you often don’t know what a poem is “about” until you’ve taken it in and allowed it to set up house keeping. Simic’s style is simple but he is rarely predictable.

            Simic’s imagination is huge. His poetry lives in an everyday world turned upside down by the simple act of reaching beyond the comfortable, everyday facades and pulling out the myths that reside there. The multitude of these acts of myth finding astounds me and I wonder if Simic is ever lulled into seeing anything as ordinary or if he just always walk around seeing the little angels and demons residing in the things the rest of us take for granted. Oh, sometimes Simic slips into formula, misses a beat or two, but, at his best, Simic is a master of that intriguing category, the literal symbol.

            Mary Kinzie, in A Poet’s Guide to Poetry, defines the literal symbol as, “Natural objects or acts which become symbolic in context but whose tenor is left implicit.” That’s fair as far as it goes. (My only serious quibble is with the meaning of the world “natural:“ it’s much too ambiguous and invites Baudrillard’s dismissal of the notion of nature as a totally modern fabrication, one side of a binary opposition) Simic is a poet of the implicit, not the explicit; his specialty is rubbing ordinary things up against us in such a way that they gain preternatural presence, cling and make us uneasy. But, why do I find the implicit - that stuff that doesn’t knock at the front door and tell you exactly what it is but, instead, barges mysteriously in and set up housekeeping - so attractive?

            My theory (Hey, I know that we all have them but this is my essay) is that the most emotionally satisfying poetry implies through image rather than explains through narrative. Language works through a web of approximations, a reservoir of arbitrary but inter-related signs that a culture has agreed on. All is relative in such a system; we all understand the word, “red” but exactly what it signifies is eternally subjective; even if we agree on the exact shade, I cannot exactly experience what you are really seeing, what you actually mean. Sorry, there is simply not one iota of “redness” native to the word “red.” So, how do we attempt to reach beyond language’s relative limits to a more fundamental awareness? A frontal assault of approximations simply wont work and so we are left with implication.

            Different types of text successfully act on our fundamental awareness through implication. There is even art’s evil twin, commercial advertising, which daily successfully prods us into an emotional desiring of assorted products that we don’t need at all and, often, that we know - on an intellectual level - aren‘t even good for us. (I don’t smoke but there is an irrational - A Western idea worthy of thorough deconstruction, though I imagine that it probably already has been done, no doubt, somewhere brilliantly by Foucault in his examinations of  our evolving notions of “insanity,” - part of me that yearns to be a “Marlboro Man”) But, I am specifically interested in how poetry implies what something feels like, at the moment, through trope. Kinzie describes trope as a spectrum of  devices in which metaphor resides in the middle while the extremes are occupied by abstraction and literal symbol, (“whose sole operative trait is resonant physical presence” - Kinzie). It seems plain to me that, the further on Kinzie’s scale we move toward abstraction, the more we are dependent on the more cerebrally artificial effects of language.

            Thus, my interest in literal symbol. Kinzie’s “resonant physical presence” is, to my mind, a poetical devise beyond direct explication because it is language which comes closest to reaching beyond our outer intellectual layer, our place of language, our conscious, into  the subconscious, where older, nonlinguistic signs reside. This even, maybe, makes sense if you believe that language arose first for the purpose of cognitive modelling, not for the purpose of communication, which was already efficiently taking place through other sign sets. (Thomas Sebeok, essay, “In What Sense is Language a Primary ‘Modelling System‘?”) With this explanation (defense) in hand I return to Simic and his wielding of literal symbol.  “The Once Over” is an evocative example:

            Slaves of fatality, at times you remember

            Your childhood and in the very next breath

            Your death comes into view

            In a setting so familiar, it could be this house,

            This room, this open window.

            A bluejay is screeching in the yard.

            You turn your head and continue to listen

            Long after the danger is over.

            The only sound now is that of a caterpillar

            Crawling up the window screen.

            The scent of lilacs overpowering,

            And then as suddenly gone . . .

            You open your eyes with a start.

            The wall before you like a movie screen

            With the grainy old film noir over.

            I chose this example because the tropes, surrounding the literal symbol are uncharacteristically tame; there are no exotically twisted circumstances here; it is just a brilliantly evoked moment. Why does it move us? Why do we wake with a start? Literal symbol is Simic’s playground.

            Indeed. The descriptive passage beginning in the second stanza and extending into the third is pure “resonant physical presence” whose power comes from “the pressure on material things to yield immaterial meanings” (Kinzie). This pressure, I imagine, derives from the constant interplay of the infinite assortment of sign types taking place around us. Literal symbol, then, might just be where the interface of language with subconscious sign sets really occurs.

             Poem after poem, Simic does it, and does it as well as anyone. He is too easily  dismissed today because his style is so simple and unfashionable. Simic is accessible but he is not light. Many of the poets I most admire for their style share the principal commonality of a facility with literal symbol. Larry Levis and  W.S. Merwin are two such poets whose styles, otherwise, vary markedly from both Simic’s and each other‘s.

            I am not implying that the literal symbol, as defined by Kinzie, is the only poetical device that exerts pressure on us in an emotional, non-cognitive way. However, poetry is a mix of  what Kinzie describes as “the six elements of relation and resemblance”: line, syntax, diction, trope, rhetoric and rhythm. I would like to think, however, that if we are willing to blur the tidily cerebral and compartmentalizing boundaries a bit, that literal symbol’s presence is pervasive to some degree (maybe even, an entirely necessary degree, if we are to call our particular use of language, “poetry”) throughout all devices. Assonance and alliteration then might be thought of as embodying a literal symbolism with implicit meanings. Indeed, it is easy to imagine the effect that the sounds of words have upon us as deriving from pre-language audible sign sets: ssssssssssssss - is the feel of menace! (Or--as a cautionary--a deflating tire?)

            This relaxed notion of device also works within the elements of literal symbol’s category, trope. For example what happens if I, say, use “a bootie held in the hand of a firefighter” as a metaphor? The image alone is emotionally gut wrenching without knowing what I might actually intend it as a metaphor for. Death? Loss? Isolation? Memory? Literary criticism? The initial emotional effect is simply not dependent on the actual end use of the metaphor. Neither, can the initial emotional sense be satisfyingly “explained.”

            The actual text is only, “a bootie held in the hand of a firefighter,”  which is utterly  ambiguous out of context but that, never the less, achieves immediate emotional response because it simultaneously appeals to and thwarts our most basic protective and nurturing instincts. The principal object is “bootie” and everything else modifies our sense of it. A “bootie” is a tiny boot and implies something which is not fully formed, is vulnerable - shouts, (is itself a metaphor for) “Baby!” But, booties come in pairs: where is the other? Where is the baby? “Bootie” is preceded by “a”  which intensifies an ambiguous sense that resists our instinctive need for a safe resolution/closure. A bootie is “held in” and thus rendered even more vulnerable by the passive tense but “held in” also appeals to our desire to hold close and shelter the vulnerable child. A bootie is held in “the hand;” Whose hand apparently matters since “hand” is modified by the specificity of “the” and we must ask, “What is it about the hand that matters?“ . . .Well, it happens to be the hand “of a firefighter.“ ALARM!!

            The preceding is just a cursory look at one short phrase. There is pressure present in others of its devices nudging us toward imbuing a “material thing” with “immaterial presence.” For example, isn’t there implicit emotional significance in the syntax choices? Does the syntax’s incompleteness effect us? Does the absence of a form of “to be” before “held” perhaps divert us from considering “bootie” as a dynamic subject and concentrate our awareness on its “bootieness,” its potential symbolism? Hey! And, diction was a definite consideration as we initially considered the phrase. Many would argue that I am long past the threshold of absurd over-analysis, (If you think about it, I just asked an interrogative variation of the newly notorious, “It depends on what the meaning of is is.“) but if we buy into Postmodern ideas of text and reader, then maybe not. We exist in an ocean of interacting, permutating, mutating signs and, because we are fish, we are largely unaware of the water, beyond the superficial tickle of language upon our gills. Allow me one last shot:

The syntax leading up to and the quotation marks surrounding the initially considered text invite our especial attention. Even the prose enjambment confronting us suddenly with “firefighter” was  potentially important. Maybe, too, font type and size. Potentially effecting factors stretch out of sight in every direction. So, I can’t help but wonder if the particular illumination of my computer screen effects my contemplation of the given object or--ever outward--the quality of the surrounding room. It’s slightly overcast today and there seems a pall (of smoke?). Would you read this differently if it were hand-written? What if the paper were burning in your hand?

            Admittedly,  a lot depends on the sensibility of the reader but signing about signs drops us, whether we acknowledge  it or not, instantaneously into a maze of smoke and mirrors. It might help if we - as what? literary critics? semioticians? thoughtful readers? - also think of ourselves as metaphorical firefighters searching for the lost child (meaning) inside a smoke (sign) filled house-of-mirrors (ourselves) with one searching hand (language) blindly grasping at something. What is the significance of the bootie we just found, anyway?