Table Of ContentCHAPTER 6
Language in Operation
Then the bird said "Nevermore."
Edgar Allan Foe
Recently, aboard a train, I overheard a scrap of conversation. A
man said to a young lady, "They were playing 'The Raven' on the
radio. An old record of a London actor dead for years. I wish you had
heard his Nevermore.''^ Although I was not the addressee of the stran
ger's oral message, I received it nevertheless and later transposed this
utterance first into handwritten and then into printed symbols; now it
has become a part of a new framework—my message to the prospec
tive reader of these pages.
The stranger had resorted to a literary quotation, which apparently
alluded to an emotional experience shared with his female interlocutor.
He referred to a performance allegedly transmitted by broadcast. A
dead British actor was the original sender of a message addressed "to
whom it may concern." He, in turn, had merely reproduced Edgar
Allan Poe's literary message of 1845. Furthermore, the American poet
himself was ostensibly only transmitting the confession of a "lover la
menting his deceased mistress" ^—perhaps the poet himself, perhaps
some other man, real or imaginary. Within this monologue, the word
nevermore is attributed to a talking bird, with the further implication
50
Language in Operation
that that one word uttered by the Raven had been caught from some
unhappy master, as the melancholy burden of his customary laments.
Thus the same single word was successively set in motion by the
h\'pothetical "master," the Raven, the lover, the poet, the actor, the
radio station, the stranger on the train, and finally by the present au
thor. The "master" repeatedly exteriorized the elliptic one-word sen
tence of his inner speech, nevermore; the bird mimicked its sound se
quence; the lover retained it in his memory and reported the Raven's
part with reference to its probable provenience; the poet wrote and
published the lover's story, actually inventing the lover's, Raven's, and
master's roles; the actor read and recited for a recording the piece as
signed by the poet to the lover with its nevermore attributed by the
lover to the Raven; the radio station selected the record and put it on
the air; the stranger listened, remembered, and quoted this message
with reference to its sources, and the linguist noted his quotation, re
constituting the whole sequence of transmitters and perhaps even mak
ing up the roles of the stranger, the broadcaster, and the actor.
This is a chain of actual and fictitious senders and receivers, most of
whom merely relay and to a large extent intentionally quote one and
the same message, which, at least to a few of them, was familiar be
forehand. Some of the participants in this one-way communication are
widelv separated from each other in time and/or space, and these gaps
are bridged through various means of recording and transmission. The
whole sequence offers a typical example of an intricate process of com
munication. It is very different from the trivial pattern of the speech
circuit graphically presented in textbooks: A and В talk face to face so
that an imaginary thread goes from A's brain through his mouth to
the ear and brain of В and through his mouth back to A's ear and
brain.
"The Raven" is a poem written for mass consumption or, to use
Poe's own phrase, a poem created "for the express purpose of run
ning"; and it did indeed have a great "run."-2 In this mass-oriented
poetic utterance, as the author well understood, the reported speech of
the avian tide-hero is the "pivot upon which the whole structure might
turn" (p. 37). Actually, this message within a message "produced a sen
sation," and readers were reportedly "haunted by the Nevermore.'" The
kev, afterwards revealed by the writer himself, lies in his bold experi
mentation with the procedures of communication and with its imder-
hing duality: "the great element of unexpectedness" combined with its
51
QUESTIONS OF LITERARY THEORY
very opposite. "As evil cannot exist without good, so unexpectedness
must arise from expectedness."^
When the unusual visitor first entered his chamber, the host did not
know what the intruder would say, if anything. He had no expecta
tions whatever: thus he put his question "in jest and without looking
for a reply" (p. 45). He was therefore startled at the stillness broken by
reply so aptly spoken. The bird's "continuous use of the one word 'Nev
ermore'" (p. 38) indicates, however, that what it utters is its only stock
and store. This, once known, inverts the situation from one of total
uncertainty to one of complete predictability. Similarly, there is no
freedom of choice when an officer of the Fourth Hussars is commis
sioned to perform a task: "Sir" is the only admissible answer. However,
as Churchill notes in his memoirs,* this reply can carry a wide range of
emotional modulations; whereas the "non-reasoning creature capable
of speech" (p. 38), having presumably learned its word by rote, mo
notonously repeats it without any variation. Thus its utterance lacks
both cognitive and emotive information. The automatic speech of the
ungainly fowl and the speaker itself are intentionally deprived of any
individuality: it even appears sexless. To show this is the purpose of
the formulas Sir or Madam and with mien of lord or lady, which some
critics call mere padding. On the other hand, each time the nevermore
is ascribed not to the indifferent pronouncements of the Raven but to
the passionate ravings of the lover, an exclamation mark, symbolizing
an emotive intonation, is substituted for the customary period.
The word itself "should involve the utmost conceivable amount of
sorrow and despair" (p. 40), yet the sensory sameness of the message
dispatched by both creatures, man and bird, arouses a peculiar satisfac
tion of relieved, "broken" loneliness. The pleasure increases, inasmuch
as this equalization ties together the most dissimilar of all imaginable
interlocutors—two talking bipeds, one featherless and the other feath
ered. As the author relates, "a parrot, in the first instance, suggested
itself, but was superseded forthwith by a Raven . . . infinitely more in
keeping with the intended tone''' (pp. 38-39). The surprise that an ex
change should occur at all is counteracted by the likeness of the grim,
ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous character of the utterer to its ob
sessive utterance.
With each repetition of the bird's stereotyped rejoinder, the be
reaved lover more surely anticipates it, so that he adapts his questions
to what Poe defines as "the expected 'Nevermore.'" In an amazing grasp
52
Language in Operation
of the multiple fimctions performed simultaneously by verbal com-
monkation, Poe says that these queries are propounded "half in super-
sition and half in that species of despair which delights in self-torture"
ip. 40). For talking birds, however, as their student Mowrer noted,^
localization is primarily a means of getting their human partner
Ю continue communication with them and to give in fact no sign of
farting.
In this peculiar variety of interlocution, here carried to its extreme
imit. each question is predetermined by the answer that follows: the
\
jcswrr is the stimulus and the question, the response. Incidentally,
âïcsc echoing queries are inversely analogous to the interpretation of
aSK echo as a reply to the questioner, and Poe, who was most sensitive
ao rxmctuation in verse, persistently inserted the question mark in the
™oct" sheet of this stanza:
-•\nd the only word there spoken was the whispered word,
"Lcnore?"
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word,
"Lenore!"*
~'-<i -nNerted answer and question game is typical of inner speech,
*-cre the subject knows beforehand the reply to the question he will
himself. Poe leaves an opening for this optional interpretation
•" rîe quasi-dialogue with the Raven: toward the end of the poem "the
jExrr.non of making him emblematical of Mournful and Never-ending
I-jmanbrance is permitted distincdy to be seen" (p. 46). Perhaps the
Ttrd and its replies are only imagined by the lover. A vaciMation be-
•r*ccn the factual and the metaphorical levels is facilitated by a recur-
:ir-.r illusion to dozing {While I nodded, nearly napping . . . dreaming
mrzjuns) and by "transferring the point itself into the realm of
Manory"'' (Ah, distinctly I remember).
.Ml the traits typical of verbal hallucination—as listed, for example,
n Lagache's monograph*—appear in the confession of Poe's lover:
лгг:пипоп of vigilance, anguish, alienation of one's own speech and
JE itrribution to an alter, accompanied by "a close circumscription of
вокг' ( p. 42). Poe's skill in suggesting the empirical plausibility of an
irrurural event was admired and praised by Dostoevski],^ who recap-
ijrtd It in Ivan Karamazov's nightmare. Here the dehrious hero alter-
•ыггл' lnteфrets his experience as a hallucinatory monologue of his
•a- or as an intrusion by an "unexpected visitor." The stranger is ad-
53
QUESTIONS OF LITERARY THEORY
dressed as "devil" by Ivan, as bird or devil by Poe's hero; both men are
uncertain whether they are asleep or awake. "No, you are not someone
apart, you are myself," Ivan insists; "it's I, I myself speaking, not you";
and the intruder agrees: "I am only your hallucination." The intermit
tent use of the first- and second-person pronouns by both "speakers"
reveals, however, the ambiguity of the theme. In Poe's view, without
such a tension between the "upper" and the "under current" of mean
ing, "there is always a certain hardness or nakedness, which repels the
artistical eye" (pp. 45-46). The two cardinal and complementary traits
of verbal behavior are brought out here: that inner speech is in essence
a dialogue and that any reported speech is appropriated and remolded
by the quoter, whether it is a quotation from an alter or from an earlier
phase of the ego {said I). Poe is right: it is the tension between these
two aspects of verbal behavior which imparts to "The Raven"—and,
let us add, to the climax of The Brothers Karamazov—so much of its
poetic richness. This antinomy reinforces another, analogous tension—
the tension between the poet's ego and the I of the fictitious story
teller: I betook myself to linking fancy unto fancy.
If in a sequence a prior moment depends upon a later one, linguists
speak about a re£iressive action. For instance, when Spanish and English
changed the first /1/ of the word colonel into /r/ in anticipation of the
final /1/, this change exhibits a regressive dissimilation. R. G. Kent re
ports a typical slip by a radio announcer, in which "the convention was
in session" became "the confession was in session": the final word had
exerted a regressive assimilative influence upon the proper "conven
tion." ^^ Likewise, in "The Raven" the question is dependent on the
reply. Moreover, the imaginary respondent is retrospectively deduced
from its response Nevermore. The utterance is inhuman, both in its
persistent cruelty and in its automatic, repetitive monotony. Hence an
articulate but subhuman creature is suggested as speaker, and in partic
ular a corvine bird, not only because of its gloomy appearance and
"ominous reputation" (p. 40) but also because in most of its phonemes
the noun raven is simply an inversion of the sinister never. Poe signals
this connection by adjoining the two words: Quoth the Raven ^''Never
more.'''' The juxtaposition becomes particularly telling in the final
stanza:
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting; still is sitting
On the pallid bust of PaUas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
54
Language in Operation
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the
floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!
Here the pair Raven, never is enhanced by a series of other mutuaHy
corresponding sound sequences, matched to create an affinity between
certain key words and to underscore their semantic association. The
mtroductory clause, concluded with the series still—sit—still—sit, is
linked with the final clause by the chain flit—float—floor—lift, and both
pivots are manifestly juxtaposed: never flitting, still is sitting. The play
upon the words pallid and Pallas is reinforced by the whimsical rhyme
pallid bust—Pallas just. The initial dentals /s,d/ of the corresponding
vequences seeming and demon (trochaic feet with the same vocaUc seg
ment followed by an /m/ and in both cases with a final nasal) are with
a shght variation blended in the groups is dreaming ITAI and streaming
St'. In the prefatory note to the first publication of this poem, written
bv the poet himself or at his instigation, "the studious use of similar
sounds in unusual places" ^^ is singled out as its chief device. Against
the background of equidistant and regularly recurring rhymes, Poe de
liberately introduces rhymes displaced to achieve the "whole effect of
unexpectedness ."^^ Regularly repeated sound sequences in such cus-
tomar\' rhymes as remember—December—ember or morrow—borrow—
sorrow are supplemented by "reversals" (to use Edmund Wilson's
term): lonely /lounli/—only /ounli/—soul in /sôulin/. The regressive as-
тса of the speech-sequence is under focus, and this variation serves to
mterlock the "never = ending" theme of the Raven, sitting lonely, with
die opposite theme of the lost Lenore /linor/.
Not only the questions propounded by the desperate lover but in
act the whole poem are predetermined by the final rejoinder nevermore
md are composed in distinct anticipation of the denouement, as the
ijthor disclosed in "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846), his own
commentary to "The Raven": "the poem may be said to have its begin-
Tsnz—at the end" (p. 40). It is indeed difficult to understand now the
continuous repudiations of Poe's piece of self-analysis, called a mis-
jrading mystification, a premeditated farce, unparalleled effrontery,
iT.d one of his mischievous caprices to catch the critics. Although Poe's
jcrrer of August 9, 1846, to his friend Cooke recommended this com-
л'гаг псэгas the "best specimen of analysis," ^^ an alleged oral statement
'Г. the writer was quoted posthumously: a supposed confession that
55
QUESTIONS OF LITERARY THEORY
he had never intended this article to be received seriously. French
poets, however, admiring both Poe's poetry and his essays on poetr\',
have wondered in which instance he was jesting: whether in writing
this marvelous commentary or in disavowing it to soothe a sentimental
female interviewer.
In point of fact, the author of "The Raven" formulated perfectly the
relationship between poetic language and its translation into what now
would be called the metalanguage of scientific analysis. In his Margi
nalia, Poe recognized that the two aspects stand in complementar}'
relation to each other: he said that we are able "to see distinctly the
machinery" of any work of art and at the same time to enjoy this abil
ity, but "only just in proportion as we do not enjoy the legitimate effect
designed by the artist." Moreover, in order to counter past and future
objections to his analysis of "The Raven," he added that "to reflect
analytically upon Art, is to reflect after the fashion of the mirrors in the
temple of Smyrna, which represent the fairest images as deformed"
(1849).^* Truth, in Poe's opinion, demands a precision absolutely an
tagonistic to the predominant aim of poetic fiction; but when he trans
lated the language of art into the language of precision, the critics ap
prehended his attempt as a mere fiction defying truth.
The author's account of the poem's composition, which critics of
the past pronounced a juggling trick or grand hoax upon its readers,
has recendy been described by Denis Marion as an act of self-
deception. ^^ Yet with equal justice it might be set against the intimate
story of Poe's own life with Virginia Clemm in "hourly anticipation of
her loss."
The alternation between the illusory glimmer of hope in the lover's
queries and the finality of the "anticipated answer" Nevermore is uti
lized to "bring him . . . the most of the luxury of sorrow," until the
Raven's inevitable reply to "the lover's final demand" proclaims the
irrevocability of his loss and provides him with the "indulgence ... of
this self-torture" (p. 45). A few months after Virginia's death Poe
wrote to George Eveleth:
Six years ago, a wife, whom I loved as no man ever loved before
[in "The Raven" we read of terrors never felt before], ruptured a
blood-vessel in singing. Her life was despaired of. I took leave of
her forever and underwent all the agonies of her death. She recov
ered partially and I again hoped. At the end of a year the vessel
broke again—I went through precisely the same scene. Again in
56
Language in Operation
about a year afterward. Then again—again—again and even once
again at varying intervals. Each time I felt all the agonies of her
death—and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more
dearly and clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity ... I
became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity ... I had
indeed nearly abandoned all hope of a permanent cure when I
round one in the Aeath of my wife. This I can and do endure as
becomes a man—it was the horrible, never-ending oscillation be
tween hope and despair which I could not longer have endured
widiout the total loss of reason.'*
"a both cases, in "The Raven" and in the epistolary confession, the
anrcipated denouement is everlasting bereavement: Virginia's death
acrr \ears of protracted agony and the lover's despair of meeting Le-
зссг e\en in another world. "The Raven" appeared on January 29,
ïi+5; "The Philosophy of Composition" was published in April 1846;
ïtoc's \4ife died on January 30, 1847. Thus "the expected 'Nevermore,'"
icscalcd in the essay as the central motif of the poem, is in tune with
rx biographical background as well.
Poe's critical essay, however, dismisses the circumstances which
stHnulate the poet as irrelevant to a consideration of the poem itself
The theme of the 'bereaved lover" (p. 39) antedates Virginia's illness
aod in faa haunts all Poe's poetry and prose. In "The Raven" this
dianc displays a particular "force of contrasf (p. 43), expressed in a
poimedlv romantic oxymoron: the colloquy between the lover and the
bird is an anomalous commvmication about the severance of all com
munication. This pseudo-dialogue is tragically one-sided: there is no
teal interchange of any kind. To his desperate queries and appeals the
boo receives only seeming answers—from the bird, from the echo,
jod fix)m the volumes oï forgotten lore; his own Hps are "best suited"
P- _;91 for vain soUloquy. Here a fiirther oxymoron, a new contradic-
•aoa, is advanced by the poet: he assigns to this soUtary speech the
widest radius of overt communication, but reaUzes at once that this
ohibitionistic widening of the appeal may "endanger the psychologi-
cà rcalin- of the image of the enlarged self confronting the notself," as
- A-as later to be formulated by Edward Sapir.'''
it mav be recalled once more that the supreme effect of "The Raven"
its in its daring experimentation with intricate problems of commu-
•laiion. The dominant motif of the poem is the lover's irrevocable
'-f,5 oi contact with the rare and radiant maiden; henceforth no com-
lâkjC context with her is conceivable, either on this earth or within the
57
QUESTIONS OF LITEIIARY THEORY
distant Aidenn (the fanciful spelling is needed as an echo for maiden).
In Poe's poetic creed, it is a mere "array of incident," irrelevant to the
"machinery" of his work, whether the lover's loss is due to the maid
en's death or to a more homely and prosaic, but nonetheless inexor
able, message of the variety I will not see you again, transmitted to that
gloomy room in upper New York which was allegedly depicted in
"The Raven." Nothing about the heroine except her absence and her
namelessness forevermore is of any significance for the poet's purpose:
his poem "will be poetic in the exact ratio of its dispassion." ^^ But to
suit the "popular taste" (p. 34) and perhaps to allay repressed fears and
desires of his own, the poet chose to have the maiden dead—death was
"the most melancholy of topics" (p. 39)—and to borrow for her the
sonorous name Lenore from the famous ballad about the living bride
of the dead.
Poe's insight into "the wheels and pinions" (p. 33) of verbal art and
of verbal structure in general, the insight of an artist and analyst com
bined, is startling indeed. His skilled employment in verse and his lin
guistic examination of the refrain Nevermore are especially pertinent,
for it is here that "the sense of identity" (p. 37) is direcdy challenged,
both as to sound and to meaning. The inevitable Nevermore is always
the same and always different: on the one hand, expressive modula
tions diversify the sound and, on the other, "the variation of application'''
(p. 39), that is, the multiformity of contexts, imparts a different con
notation to the meaning of the word on its every recurrence.
A word out of context allows an indeterminate number of solutions,
and the listener is engaged in guessing what is meant by the isolated
Nevermore. But within the context of the dialogue it signifies by turns:
nevermore will you forget her; nevermore will you take comfort; nev
ermore will you embrace her; nevermore will I leave you. Moreover,
the same word can function as a proper name, an emblematic noun
which the lover attributes to his nocturnal visitor: a bird above his cham
ber door . . . with such name as "Nevermore" Poe rendered this variation
of usage particularly effective "by adhering, in general, to the mono
tone of sound"—that is to say, by favoring a deliberate suppression of
emotive modulations.
On the other hand, however great the variety of contextual mean
ings, the word nevermore, like any other word, retains the same general
meaning through аД its varied applications. The tension between this
intrinsic unity and the diversity of contextual or situational meanings
58
Language in Operation
* asr CTvotaJ problem of the linguistic discipline labeled semantics,
.тис гк discipline termed phonemics is primarily concerned with the
звюс bet\\een identity and variation on the sound level of language.
~'ж oxnpound nevermore denotes a negation, a denial forever in the
2S opposed to the past. Even the transposition of this temporal
mto a proper name retains a metaphorical tie with this general
sc value.
rvcriasting disavowal seems inconceivable, and popular wisdom
• to charm it away by such witty contradictions as "a neverday
. ÛK owl bares its rump," and 'Svhen Hell freezes over," or other
• locutions studied by Archer Taylor, i^ Curiously enough, in the
авс -«Tcar "The Raven" was written, a scholarly interest in locutions
-ccr" and "nevermore" was manifested for the first time, by the
.m-cjn poet Uhland. More than anyone, Baudelaire, in his notes to
**гЧ poem, vividly conceived the particular conceptual and emotive
аист ot this "profound and mysterious" word.^° It fuses end with
It contrasts the prospective with the foregone, the eternal
die transient, negation with assertion, and in itself it contrasts
with the animal nature of the utterer, who is inescapably
to the tangible present of time and space. Poe's challenging
became a cliché, and in a popular hit of prerevolutionary
I "^a parrot cries jamais, jamais, aïways jamais."
-^cipate the final refrain and to enhance its import, Poe em-
• :^cies of etymological figure. Semantically, the author pre-
" jr the unlimited negation nevermore by repeating the restric-
_ -:;on merely this and nothing more; the negation of balm in the
: 3 rbreshadowed by the negation of comparable fantastic terrors
: rist; and the negated assertion will be . . . nevermore is preceded
'-c Jcspair of the asserted negation nameless here for evermore. Ex-
jsnafc- Ae poem breaks up the unit nevermore into its grammatical
by separating more, ever, and no (with its alternant n-, the
•âguring before a vowel: n-ever, n-aught, n-ay, n-either, n-or), and
: them in new contexts, most of which correspond in meter and
Only this and nothing more; Nameless here for evermore; terrors
^éit before; ever dared to dream Ьфге; and the stillness gave no token.
. tbe unit more is susceptible of dissociation into root and suffix,
is confronted with most and with the degrees of comparison
: ocbcr adjectives, as in somewhat louder than before.
components we obtain by dissecting all these units into smaller
59
