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metonymy

Muriel Rukeyser, Zombie Necromancer

November 23, 2012 by mthunter22 Leave a Comment

Posted on November 23, 2012 by Joe Sacksteder

I don’t care for this new zombie renaissance. And I don’t mean that like I’m afraid of zombies or something. I just think that 1). it’s a default subject matter for horror writers, 2). all interesting scenarios and subject matters were long ago exhausted, and 3). our current fascination with the genre points to disturbing cultural predilections. So I was surprised when reading a new compilation put out by Butler University’s Pressgang Press, Monsters: A Collection of Literary Sightings, that my favorite story was Amiee Bender’s Among Us. Briefly, it starts as a story about a zombie that develops a taste for the decaying flesh of its fellow zombies rather than the flesh of the living. The thing that gives the story larger ramifications is how it “zooms out” to show other instants of financial, agricultural, and even domestic “cannibalism” in our society. In one of the vignettes, a salmon farm feeds bits of their own product to their product, and the meat from the salmon-fed-salmon becomes poisonous for humans to eat. Another vignette is a description of the scene from the film Being John Malkovich when said actor tumbles into his own subconscious, an example more recursive or ouroboric than cannibalistic.

Somehow, I thought of Rukeyser and the dead workers of the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster. In the poem “The Cornfield” from The Book of the Dead, Rukeyser veers us off the road that led us into the poem set in the opening poem, steers us across back roads–stopping once to ask for directions–to a field where workers who died from silicosis were buried “five at a time.” The burials were hasty and covert, as Rukeyser (through George Robinson) describes in this example:

I knew a man
who died at four in the morning at the camp.
At seven his wife took clothes to dress her dead
husband, and at the undertaker’s
they told her the husband was already buried.

If we haven’t yet understood that the bodies of the dead are fertilizing the corn that we eat, just as the work that killed them provides the electricity we mindlessly use, Rukeyser compares their meager, approximate grave markers (“wood stakes, charred at tip, / few scratched and named”) with the way we might mark the produce in our backyard plots:

Think of your gardens. But here is corn to keep.
Marked pointed sticks to name the crop beneath.
Sowing is over, harvest is coming ripe.

Of course the workers are morbidly presented as our crops here, but we could interpret the chilling idea of a harvest in a positive light as well, one in which the dead are resurrected to, in a way, avenge themselves against their wrongful deaths. As the dead beneath the field cry, “Earth, uncover my blood!” Rukeyser casts her act of poesis as that uncovering. Here, the poet is a noble take on the necromancer who raises and controls the dead.

This much I understood. But one of my students connected this zombie theme to the text Rukeyser selects from the Egyptian Book of the Dead for the poem “Absolom”: “I shall journey over the earth among the living.” Although I have always read this line in a hopeful light, the student pointed out a darker interpretation, that since these men know that they have silicosis blooming in their lungs, they’re basically dead already.

I try to get my students charged up over Rukeyser by describing The Book of the Dead as “a horror poem” (“Forced through this crucible,” I shudder dramatically, “a million men!”). I’m a huge proponent for eroding the wall between genre and literary, but usually I look to the McSweeney’s crowd or to books like Pressgang’s Monsters. I admit that I don’t often look to poetry for fresh takes on sci-fi, horror, westerns, fantasy, etc. But The Book of the Dead is not the only place Rukeyser indulges in imagery traditionally associated with the horror genre. Her Elegies (1949) are full of amputation, decay, and mutilation. In “River Elegy,” she writes:

The rich streets are full of empty coats parading,
and one adolescent protesting violin,
the slums full of their flayed and faceless bodies,
they shiver, they are working to buy their skin.
They are lost.

Of the ten elegies, she alone dates this most gruesome one, Summer 1940, as if telling the reader to root it in the context of World War II. We can specifically affix the “Half-faced, half-sexed… living dead” of this elegy to victims of war, but Rukeyser is vague enough about the identity of this city “built for the half-dead and half-alive” that we are free to interpret the place as anywhere and the cause to any number of mid-century (or half-century) evils. It’s difficult not to recall Eliot’s The Wasteland:

Unreal City,
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.

Filed Under: Ruke Blog Tagged With: Aimee Bender, Elegies, metonymy, Muriel Rukeyser, synecdoche, The Book of the Dead, Zombies

Synecdoche, West Virginia

November 16, 2012 by mthunter22 2 Comments

Posted on November 16, 2012 by Joe Sacksteder

This past spring I was attending a Creative Writing Department meeting here at Eastern Michigan University, and one of my colleagues mentioned a list of literary terms that we’re supposed to make sure all of our Intro students are familiar with. I immediately became nervous and scouted the room for other people who looked like they might have never heard of this list. Either everyone was pretty good at pretending–Ah yes, the list!–or I was the only one who missed the memo. I discreetly obtained a copy of the list without anybody finding out (until this incriminating blog post, I suppose), but seeing the chosen terms didn’t completely alleviate my nervousness. I wasn’t sure I could define all of them. Referent, mimesis … aporia!?! I mean, I could nod when other people used them in conversation, but I thought I was teaching creative writing so I didn’t have to explain tough terms like these. But, no, I realized–this is a good thing. The time has come to finally untangle signifier and signified.

My colleagues take various approaches to the list. Some give students the list right away and send them to the nearest dictionary of literary terms. Some, I believe, give a test. Some ask students to use the terms when providing workshop feedback to their peers. I decided that I would pepper the words throughout my semester’s syllabus, matching them up with lessons and readings where they seemed most applicable.

There was Googling involved. Wikipedia was consulted once or twice. Donation pleas from Jimmy Wales were ignored. While trying to figure out how exactly synecdoche and metonymy weren’t the same word, some baffling hopscotch of hyperlinks landed me on an essay I read in graduate school, Shoshana Wechsler’s “A Ma(t)ter of Fact and Vision: The Objectivity Question and Muriel Rukeyser’s The Book of the Dead.” Wechsler allowed me to check yet another tricky word off the list:

Rukeyser’s poem narrates the story of one particular and localized catastrophe, which is presented as a synecdoche for the larger whole.

I drew a circle on the board–my sister’s the art teacher–labeled “Disasters of the 1930s,” and a smaller circle within it to represent the Hawk’s Nest Tunnel Disaster. If the word synecdoche itself, in Greek, means “simultaneous understanding,” Rukeyser wants us to understand that specific people (with names!) died in a specific disaster from specific, preventable neglect while simultaneously getting us to realize that she’s not just talking about one instance of corporate carelessness, greed, and cover-up, but any situation in which the weak are subjugated by the powerful. (We eventually erased “of the 1930s”.) When she sets up her objectivist camera of poetic consciousness in the dingy town of Gauley Bridge, West Virginia, she wants to preserve how that one town looked at that point in history, but at the same time point out that “any town looks like this one street town.” And not just any one-street, American town. Any town.

But metonymy. Oh dear. My interpretation is that, while synecdoche uses the part to represent the whole (pars pro toto), as in “heads of cattle,” metonymy represents the whole by using something the whole is intimately connected to, but of which it’s not physically a part. I searched The Book of the Dead for an example, and came up with one I think is pretty good. In “Absolom” Rukeyser lists victims and towns, then funnels them into the line “the whole valley is witness.” Though I wouldn’t put it past Rukeyser to be saying the land itself is witnessing the disaster, she really means the people. Here’s the whole thing:

There was Shirley, and Cecil, Jeffrey and Oren,
Raymond Johnson, Clev and Oscar Anders,
Frank Lynch, Henry Palf, Mr. Pitch, a foreman;
a slim fellow who carried steel with my boys,
his name was Darnell, I believe. There were many others,
the towns of Glen Ferris, Alloy, where the white rock lies,
six miles away; Vanetta, Gauley Bridge,
Gamoca, Lockwood, the gullies,
the whole valley is witness.

She gives the names in order to resurrect them and pay tribute, but she distills (or even buries) them into the image of “the whole valley” so that we the readers simultaneously understand she’s talking about any low place on planet Earth.

I’d love to hear anyone else’s thoughts or examples on synecdoche and metonymy. Perhaps my definitions might need some tinkering …

Filed Under: Ruke Blog Tagged With: metonymy, Muriel Rukeyser, Pedagogy, Shoshana Wechsler, synecdoche, The Book of the Dead

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