- 1 The reverberation of the foreclosure of the symbiotic relations between mother and child lives with (...)
1Lacan teaches that the prohibition on incest is the sine qua none of speech (Seminar VII 69). Speech then entails the foreclosure of the symbiotic relations of mother and child leading to lack or loss and desire, in other words, castration. Lacan identifies the father with the figure of the law which regulates the desire for the mother and introduces the necessary symbolic distance between mother and child.1 Yet, though outside of speech, literature obsessively concerns itself with incestuous relations, be it overt or disguised, and it is crucial to examine how such relations manifest in those literary texts. Put simply, what rhetorical formation does incest require when located in literature?
2Such suppressed incestuous relations that can no longer shelter under the paternal metaphor, a mechanism which enables to find in the spoken word a substitute for what is forbidden, that is a metaphorization process that acts for the child upon the enigma of the mother’s desire (Lacan, Ecrits 462-4), require a different mode of representation and find it in catachresis. What this means is that literature founds its incestuous formation on the rhetorical tool of catachresis. Not only that, catachresis also functions as the dominant in literary works that explore incestuous themes, underpinning the plot and allowing it to persist despite the disruptive effects of incestuous relations. Unlike the rhetorical device of metaphor, which can be found in almost every poem, catachresis is far less common and appears when the poet seeks to highlight a departure from the norm—an abuse that can be clearly recognized.
3Catachresis is a form of speech that “abuses” the next word for the proper (Peacham 16). It always uses a lacuna in language, what is not there, to point to what is unsayable. Catachresis, which by nature evades stability, points to what is ambiguous and to what is being eluded and avoids a direct path. Moreover, catachresis, also called abusio, manifests a sort of misapplication, a misapplication of words, that runs deeper than meets the eye; folded into the rhetorical tool are at once the abused metaphor and the implied one, in other words, a forced metaphor. What is more, catachresis delineates a movement from what is in a domain of a fixed, proper word to a transient, improper one. It is a place where words are silenced, a deviation necessary from what is appropriate. A case in point would be poet and Pulitzer Prize Laurette Sharon Olds’s verse “so I set the mouth / of my iris to the mouth of your iris here / for this brief kiss” (“Poem to the Reader” 61). Olds transforms the image of placing actual lips on a breast during breastfeeding and abuses it into the catachrestic fastening of lips of words to the breast. In doing so, Olds crafts novel linguistic forms while also sidestepping rigid conventions, indexed through her use of the word “set,” which means to position, to settle, or to plant, while also connoting something unchanging and “fixed.” This embodies rigidity, the absolute antithesis of catachresis, whose function is to evade stability. Through these linguistic choices Olds undermines her stylistic devices, illustrating that nothing is stable, in fact.
4As mentioned before, catachresis is utilized in works that depict sexual abuse as an element that acts as its mandatory constituent, unifying and dominating all remaining elements. According to linguist Roman Jakobson, this concept of the dominant guarantees the integrity of the structure—a concept without which a work cannot be conceived and evaluated (41). Moreover, poetic works acquire a more exact determination as soon as the concept of the dominant becomes our point of departure (41). Ironically and paradoxically, I will show that catachresis as a dominant that represents the poetic work, dramatically changes those values, and diverts the course of the work. It causes not only the downfall of the protagonists, but also marks the disintegration and decay of the literary work in its entirety, mirroring the fragmentation and dissolution of the characters. In other words, it constitutes an inherent abuse, catachrestic by nature, of the work as a whole. This misuse of metaphor disrupts the cohesion of the narrative, causing it to unravel both structurally and thematically. As the metaphoric framework collapses, the characters and plotlines lose their stability, reflecting the broader collapse of all other elements within the text.
5A metaphor for hidden worlds, represented by the Japanese fan, Laura E. Richards’s fan metaphor in the poem “My Japanese Fan” (Nursery 177-178), delves into the vast American fascination with the distant and still unexplored Japanese culture at the time it was written (1890). Writer and orientalist William Elliot Griffis interpreted Japan for the West in the nineteenth century. In his The Mikado Empire (1883), he illustrates Japanese life in great detail, trying to help the American who sees Japan as “an Oriental puzzle … a Paradise of guileless children, a Utopia of artists and poets” (7). It can be said, then, that the Japanese fan, as the central image in the poem, represents the space where the child’s repressed fantasies and desires reside, and the fan represents that unknown and mysterious element the child tries to explore internally, much like the explorers who ventured to Japan. However, as a dominant macrostructure representing the unknown, the fan metaphor is a screen intended to block yet further interred mysteries from the protagonist’s eye. Thus, the painted androgynous figure on the fan undermines the metaphorical intentions of exploring repressed childhood fantasies denoted by mysterious Japan and diverts the narrative to a catachrestic path that haunts the hallucinating child confined and bedridden:
Perhaps he is a woman,
Perhaps she is a man.
His clothes they are so very queer,
So very queer, in sooth,
I sometimes call him ‘lovely maid,’
And sometimes ‘gentle youth.’
(Richards, “My Japanese Fan” ll. 3–8)
6Torquing and subverting the sub-genre of children’s poetry in favor of the splashier fantastical, Richards opens her writing to a new experience that lives in the crossroads of two worlds that birth a third: The androgyny. “Androgyne” comes from the Greek androgynos, a compound formed from the terms andros (“man”) and gyne (“woman”) (“Androgyny”). An androgyne is thus a being that possesses both genders and is considered monstrous (King 270). Thematically then, the androgynous figure on the fan represents a merger that eschews separation. A Freudian reading of such coincidence of contraries within the child would point toward incest; the androgynous hallucinations manifest the child’s fear of separation thus of incestuous tendencies. What accounts for the child’s fragility is a failure in the function of the “Paternal metaphor.” Since the androgynous figure on the fan symbolizes incest and the fan itself serves as a metaphor, it inevitably transitions into a catachrestic landscape. In other words, the fan as macrostructural dominant metaphor deviates from the proper and known to become catachresis. Consequently, it is essential to pause and conduct a critical examination of the speaker's identity before proceeding with the analysis. Establishing “My Japanese Fan’s” speaker’s gender and age is crucial, as it will not only anchor the poem’s perspective but also deepen our understanding of the complexities of the interwoven macrostructure dominant and catachresis discussed thus far.
7Designating the speaker in “My Japanese Fan” as a child, and more specifically as a girl, requires an explanation. Etti Gordon Ginzburg posits that once the poem is read within the broader context of the entire collection and especially as the second poem of two “Sick-Room Fancies” (384), the speaker in “My Japanese Fan” is, in fact, an adult, possibly Laura Richards herself. However, she also argues that the identity of the speaker in “My Japanese Fan” is not easily discerned when the poem is examined in isolation.
- 2 Gary Williams characterizes the intimate friendship between Richards’s father and Sumner as homoero (...)
8Richards’s father, Samuel G. Howe’s close friendship with Charles Sumner, which blurred conventional gender boundaries, strained the Howe’s marriage (Williams 99–101). Moreover, as her parents’ biographer, Richards “must have known that Howe suffered ‘a severe attack’ of scarlet fever during the winter of 1847” (Gordon Ginzburg 392). Howe’s sense of betrayal was probably further compounded by the visit of Sumner while she lay bedridden (393). These details, I contend, provide a unique opportunity to examine the poem through a Freudian lens. Although the concept of androgyny may have been beyond Richards’s comprehension during childhood, I argue that, as a child, she must have been aware of her mother’s distress. Not only that, the Freudian lens allows us to understand that even though Richards had not yet been born at the time, she, like Freud’s “Rat Man” (see Lacan, “Neurotic”)—who assumed his father’s debt, accrued before his birth, through obsessive repetition—appears to internalize her mother’s resentment and bitterness. In Freud's “Rat Man” case, unconscious awareness of complexities beyond understanding played a role; similarly, it can be inferred that, as a child, Richards may have unconsciously been aware of her father’s sexual ambiguities.2
9Although “My Japanese Fan” is indeed composed as part of a sick-room duo, (Nursery 175–176), I contend that both its atmosphere and tone differ markedly from those of the first poem. This deliberate construction reflects Richards’s mastery in evoking contrasts within the duo. Whereas “My Wall-Paper” demonstrates significant lyrical sophistication with lines such as “[o]ur hue attests our skyey birth” (l. 24), and can thus be attributed to the adult Richards, “My Japanese Fan” is replete with anaphora as in “[a]nd every /” (ll. 13–14) and its vocabulary lacks complexity—elements that may point to the conclusion that the speaker of the poem is a child. Moreover, the fanciful atmosphere in “My Wall-Paper” is meticulously crafted, aligning with the dreamlike fairytale woven throughout the sick-room setting. This is achieved particularly through the alliteration of the strident consonant “f” in “fall” (l. 4), “flaunting” (l. 9), “family, far / [f]rom” (ll. 17–18), “fairy” (l. 20), “floating” (l. 20), and “flung” (l. 21), all of which evoke an ethereal fairytale world. This effect is further enhanced by the vivid imagery of “diamond dew-drops” (l. 28) and the alliteration of the consonant “d,” creating a sense of unity and harmony. In contrast, such unity is absent in “My Japanese Fan,” which ends with ambiguity and uncertainty: “And so I never can / Know whether he’s a woman, / Or whether she’s a man” (ll. 22–24). I would therefore suggest that “My Wall-Paper” conveys the voice of an adult, secure in her place and finding comfort within the safety of her home environment. In contrast, the ending of “My Japanese Fan” points to it being narrated by a child haunted by doubt and sexual ambiguity.
10Exposed to ambiguous sexuality, the child’s mind in “My Japanese Fan,” generates images and visions isomorphic with what Freud refers to as “day-dreams of youth” (“Hysterical” 159). For Freud, day-dreaming in childhood is a tool whose function is to replace less desirable circumstances by a more favorable setting for the dreamer. In the poem, the girl grapples with what is intolerable for her. In a reading that aligns with Gordon Ginzburg’s analysis of the poem, which views Richards’ childhood home environment as less than desirable and auspicious, her parents, rather than providing her with an Edenic sense of safety, evoke feelings that are heavily veiled in unconscious, layered densities of insecurity. As a result, eerie images emerge and fill the line with signifiers that were absorbed unconsciously. These images require the departure, however fleeting, into another, the more colorful, metaphoric world of the decorated fan which allows for respite from the fear. The beautifully crafted macrostructure fan metaphor is altered by the child to become a monstrous (to be elaborated below) catachresis, a symbol of life’s transience, presaging the onset of senescence and the inevitability of mortality through nouns depicting advanced age, “man” and “woman,” and by introducing androgyny and potentially perversity by way of Japanese sexual expression.
11To sum up the question of the speaker, I argue that given what I identify as the speaker’s childlike tone in “My Japanese Fan,” it may be the adult Richards who is giving voice to her childhood self, particularly under the influence of her mother’s Laurence Manuscript, which seem to have unconsciously seeped into her childhood and from there to the poem. In doing so, Richards reveals herself not only as a subversive poet, introducing contentious themes into the realm of nursery and children's poetry (see further discussion below), but also as a cunning and masterful one, skillfully concealing the controversial theme of androgyny beneath the multiple layers of her entire poetic oeuvre, including the collected poems in In My Nursery and further hidden under the guise of “Sick Room Fancies” (175). This careful structuring makes the subversive nature of the poem difficult to perceive. By weaving the poem into this context, Richards ensures that the androgynous undertones remain subtly veiled, contributing to the complexity of its reception. Having established that Richards as a child is the speaker in “My Japanese Fan,” it is now necessary to return the focus to the poem to explore how trauma of sexual ambiguity is intricately masked within its verses.
12One of the ways, in which the trauma the child suffered at home surfaces, is through the breakdown of the metaphorical structure of the fan, which ultimately collapses into catachresis. Replaced by catachresis, the wholesome innocent fan metaphor can no longer guarantee the integrity of the textual structure, hasting its collapse. This disintegration acceleration is demonstrated in Richards’s use of enjambment in the three lines preceding the last quatrain. Up until that point Richards’s poetic enterprise favors short lines with numerous punctuation marks for even the most ambiguous narratives, which work well to keep in check some of the dread and anxiety that surface as we read her verse, as in: “His looks are full of friendliness; / Her attitude, of grace” (ll. 11–12), or: “She greets me with his pleasant smile, / And friendly “How-d’ye-do?” (ll. 15–16). Suddenly, the poem transitions into a series of breathless, lyrical sentences at the beginning of the second stanza, marked by two overflowing sentences without punctuation. This shift intensifies and escalates in the final three lines, which also take the form of run-on sentences. The resulting atmosphere of restlessness and urgency disrupts the sense of order and restraint previously established by the controlled, punctuated lines. Thus, the poetic discourse arrives at an atmospheric intensity and agitation, stirring a sense of uncertainty that might be read as the androgenous figure’s effort to corrupt the child, steering the metaphor to the environs of abuse: “He thinks my wisest plan / Would be to come and live with her / Upon a paper fan” (ll. 18–20). Japanese tradition imagines the double-sided object with androgynous inclinations, enticement and sexuality (Beaujot 30–31). Stage directions of the Japanese play The Mikado, for example, outline bashful looks, hewing the flirtatious nature of fans (82). At the same time, the fan in Japanese culture delineates submission. Thus combining flirtation and submission highlights the fan’s androgynous qualities (57).
- 3 Catachresis is also “abusio.” Abuse as corruption; “sexual abuse” can also be taken to metaphorical (...)
13Catachresis does not manifest explicitly in “My Japanese Fan.” Astoundingly, however, though the poet denudes the poetic arena of the microstructural said rhetorical form catachresis, temptation creeps in, corrupting the verse with the seducing invitation to “come and live with her / Upon a paper fan.” In light of this reading even the following, seemingly harmless description of the Japanese figure, “[h]is looks are full of friendliness” (l.11), may chart subversive pedophilic tendencies. Discomfort is similarly evoked through hints at the age gap between the child and the Japanese figure by means of nouns (“woman,” “man,” “maid,” “youth”). Thus the poem seems to reroute the macrostructured harmless fan metaphor to manifest as violent, abusive, and improper, in other words, as catachresis, insinuating incest.3
14Richards’s recourse to catachresis points to possible disastrous consequences of the poetic venture. Twice-mentioning “queer,” the poet steers the narrative directly to nineteenth- century queer-monstrosity synonymity and queer demonization. As such, queer demonization is congruent with Derrida’s teachings (Kearney 123), where he claims that catachresis, being a violent abuser of language, is no less than a monstrosity, that which breaks from the norm:
I am trying to produce a new kind of catachresis, another kind of writing, a violent writing, which stakes out the faults and deviations of language, so that the text produces a language of its own, in itself, which while continuing to work through tradition emerges at a given moment as a monster, a monstrous mutation without tradition or normative precedent. (Derrida qtd. in Kearney 123)
15This quote further highlights Derrida’s understanding of catachresis, suggesting that it can be interpreted as an equation of queer-monster-catachresis. It can also clarify Richards’s use of the signifier “queer” and the way it imposes the violent, abusive and monstrosity of the sign upon her line: “a sign which does not yet have its own proper sign in language” (255). Richards’s use of the signifier “queer” then determines the poem’s dominant macrostructure as catachresis, far from the sweet, innocent fan metaphor, steering it toward an unsettling, hallucinatory, and unimaginable reality.
16As mentioned before, “My Japanese Fan” holds a unique place in Richards’s oeuvre for its subversiveness; however, it is not alone. In “Prince Tatters,” I find a similar catachrestic macrostructure and portrayal of a child grappling with unconscious questions of sexual ambiguities. I assert that although “Prince Tatters” also challenges conventions, it nevertheless does so with less directness.
17A reversal of the traditional fairytale structure, the riches to rags poem “Prince Tatters” veils an elaborate and complex macrostructure metaphor of the child’s renunciation of loss (Tirra 45). Currents and crosscurrents underly the poem’s concern with the child’s attempt to emerge from under feminine influence, i.e. mother and nurse. Spectacular bursts of unbridled and excessive behavior shine a light on what is not so much about loss of objects as it is about loss of real loss, that is, according to Lacan, castration (“Inhibition” 130). That is to say that the narrative’s concern is not with the loss of the “cap” and the “coat” but with what unfolds as the poem's central conceit—loss and castration—delineating a catachrestic macrostructure, like the one in “My Japanese Fan.” Loss, contradictory to the little prince’s intent to cut his ties with his mother, exacerbates his stance vis-à-vis his seditious relations with her. According to Freud, loss is at the root of neurotic anxieties: “We have hitherto regarded [anxiety] as an affective signal of danger; but now, since the danger is so often of castration, it appears to us as a reaction to loss, a separation” (130).
- 4 Oedipus Rex is the story of Oedipus, King of Thebes, who vows to end the plague by finding the murd (...)
- 5 In his article “The Uncanny,” Freud notes that “the fear of going blind, is often enough a substitu (...)
18Positioning Richards’s “Prince Tatters” within a matrix that spans the mythological and literary dimensions feels inevitable when considering how it alludes to Oedipus4, the two-time prince who would later be king (Sophocles 1984), who kills his father and marries his mother. Upon discovering the horrendous truth of his incestuous act, Oedipus leaves Thebes, not before gouging out his own eyes, an act that is, according to Freud, tantamount to castration (“Uncanny” 231).5
19Prince Tatters’s tale invokes the narrative of yet another famous prince, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with the word “tatters” appearing in act 3 scene 2 of the play, as Hamlet expresses his immense dissatisfaction with the actors’ exaggerated efforts: “O, / it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, / periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very / rags, to split the ears of the groundlings” (ll. 8–10). Lacan suggests that incest, not ineptitude, is at the root of prince Hamlet’s indecision (Seminar VI 193–197). Lacan raises the possibility that the Danish prince’s stalling is the result of his unconscious incestuous wish to kill his father and sleep with his own mother. In other words, Hamlet’s hesitation in executing the ghost's command to kill his uncle stems from a profound unconscious identification with Claudius. By murdering Hamlet’s father and marrying his mother, Claudius has realized Hamlet’s own unconscious Oedipal desire. In other words, Lacan posits that Claudius’s actions are the externalization of Hamlet’s latent wish to enact patricide and fulfill his incestuous wish.
20Imagining the Sophoclean and Shakespearean princes, Richards’s protagonist defies separation by throwing the cap and leaving the coat “right there” to be lost (l. 11; emphasis in the original), leaving himself exposed to the temptation of incest. Incrementally escalated, the atmospheric bacchanal, born of loss and disavowing order, beckons further rebellion against castration and the Law-of-the-Father in the formidable and paradoxical castrating act of losing the “BALL” (l. 20, capitalized in original; I return to this below). The boy hence is suspended on the precipice of loss and unknowability, refusing to acknowledge the abyss of the real whose existence threatens to expose his suffering to himself: “'One cannot be thinking all day of such matters!’” (l. 7). To evade those “matters,” the poet dresses the line and the boy, only to strip both, removing the “cap,” while words gush uncontrollably: “Over the hedge he threw it; / Into the river it fell kerslap! / Stupid old thing, to do it!” (ll. 2–4). While the swaggering dauphin tries to avoid consequences for his debauchery by means of the passive voice, the lines clarify the paradoxical intention to turn a blind eye to the true impact of loss, and at the same time alludes to the place of real loss, i.e. castration, and fear of losing. That is to say, the site of the most familiar, an article of clothing, is also the primal harrowing scene where the subject experiences the loss of real satisfaction. Richards’s deliberate repetition of “lost” three times not only underscores the central theme of the poem, but also metaphorically multiplies the sense of loss, thereby magnifying its impact as if raised to the power of two. Moreover, the use of the signifier “lost” to denote loss demonstrates Freud’s argument that “the uncanny is a class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar” (“Uncanny” 220). What this means is that in “Prince Tatters” “what is heimlich thus becomes unheimlich” (224; italics in original). Because of incestuous fantasies, early traumas experienced within the family return to haunt the subject. Richards’s multiple uses of the signifier “lost” indicates the child’s fear of castration and at the same time his total blindness to said fear. The topography of the lighthearted metaphor of the loss [“lost his cap! / … lost his coat! / … LOST HIS BALL!” (ll. 1, 9–10, 20 respectively)] thus goes awry as loss and abuse assail the scene to create a dominating meta catachrestic architectural structure.
- 6 In Seminar V Lacan argues that when the child consents to castration, he in fact consents to the im (...)
21Further implicating the text in a system of catachreses (forced metaphors), Richards retraces ideas and tracks them down against their usage. One such idea, which has long existed in the cultural context of Indigenous Americans but is now being used with the infraction of a catachresis, is “eagle plume” (Fontanier 257). While underscoring the eagle’s agential capacity for transformation in Indian tradition (Murray 143–153), Richards shifts the poetic framework in “Prince Tatters” to suggest a conceptual resistance to transformation: “One cannot be thinking all day of such matters” (l. 7). Moreover, always adhering to an androgynous dialectic of defiance and accord, the poet mentions the plume as a symbol of bold masculinity that leaves its traces on paper before being lost. Surrounded by the feminine presence of “Mother,” “Nurse,” and the “nanny-goat,” little Prince Tatters is denied entry into the Oedipal phase due to the absence of the name-of-the-father, which forecloses castration. Consequently, the boy remains trapped in a dyadic relationship with these feminine figures. Rejecting all masculine signifiers—having “lost his feathered cap” and “HIS BALL”—the boy does not consent to castration, and is left without his phallus.6
22Extricating the logic of Freud’s Oedipus Complex, Lacan indicates that what Freud calls the prohibition of incest is the inauguration of the father function into the mother-child dyad. The introduction of the father, the bearer of the phallus as symbolic function, into the imaginary exchange between mother and child puts an end to the wandering tendencies of the imaginary phallus (Psychoses 319). In “Prince Tatters,” the absence of the father figure points to the lack and the trauma denoted in the repeated loss which paves the way from an idealized playful child losing a cap metaphor to a lacuna that does not yet have its “own proper sign in language” (Derrida 255), namely, the accumulative effect of the abusive and monstrous catachrestic loss.
23Virtuously and deceptively navigating through the complexities of the evaporating macrostructural metaphor, Richards’s hesitation between femininity and masculinity retrogrades the scene to catachrestic androgyny. However barricaded and impeded by feminine presence, and however denied of the symbolic function of the father’s intervention, the child is allowed to explore his own masculinity via paradoxically dismantling lexical markers, the fiercest of them is “seed” (l. 14). Erroneously, “seed” signals the boy’s tendency toward the dyadic mother-child (the feminine) relations; nevertheless, flawed as it may be, the verb “see” is embedded in “seed,” conveying the double meaning of the signifier “see” all at once. Moreover, although the protagonist means it as past tense of “see,” the polyvalent resonances of the signifier “seed,” among them “origin,” “semen” and the sordid and corrupt “seedy,” manifest the suffering and primordial trauma of the boy, who is surrounded by feminine attendants attesting to his failed masculinity (“nobody never seed”). But the poet partly voids the suffering by insisting upon marking the boy’s condition in writing, thus subjectifying the distress, and giving it form via Prince Tatters’ small acts of defiance.
- 7 According to Freud, blindness allows us to “live in ignorance of these wishes [the wishes to have s (...)
24Simultaneously, and as the poem transitions from the erroneous “seed” to the grammatically correct “'must be seen to’” (l. 27; emphasis in the original), it signals that the protagonist has traversed the Oedipal stage, indicating the activation of the paternal metaphor and the consequent diminishment of the mother’s role. What is more, the child’s attempt to shift alliance from his feminine companions to the father is partly successful as the poem ends with a recovered, steadfast position of confidence as the verb “see” shifts to the directive “'must be seen to’” (l. 27; emphasis in the original). Albeit this zigzagging, the protagonist, like Oedipus, is nevertheless destined to see and be exposed to the improper and not yet be freed of the bonds of the dyadic mother-child relations. What escapes the speaker’s eyes, the ball, “'must be seen to’” by others, that is, what the speaker does not see is translated to cecity (“‘never seed it’”), raising fear of castration, that is in turn alleviated by the catachrestic use of the word, and later by Richards’s word play (“‘must be seen to’”).7 In Seminar X, Lacan stipulates that the subject’s desire, at the level of inhibition, is “not to see,” in order to avoid the horrific payment of Oedipus, who ultimately sees “his own eyes, … thrown on the ground” (308). Like Lacan’s subject of desire, the speaker in “Prince Tatters” wishes “not to see” that which is the intolerable that cannot be represented in the unconscious, thus the real. The effects of the wordplay (“‘must be seen to’”) both undermine and stabilize the arena, bringing on a contention between trauma and the partial attempt to cure it. This constant meandering between two points of view exhibits the poem’s wavering between the forces of macrostructural metaphor and those of catachresis, but ipso facto of meandering, regression to catachresis and androgyny is raised to the second power.
25Thus, the androgynous tendencies that are uncovered in “My Japanese Fan” arise again from the lines of Richards’s “Prince Tatters,” when the protagonist is trying to transition from the feminine apparel that his “Mother” and “Nurse” force on him, and in the process loses “HIS BALL” altogether. Richards manifests these tendencies via language. As mentioned before, the signifier “seed” in the second stanza is replaced in the last by “[t]hey must be seen to.” Prince Tatters hastily covers, that is loses, all sexual objects such as “eagle plume” and “BALL” that connote loss and castration. Richards’s allusion to these objects, in this children’s verse attests to her aptitude to walk a tight rope between entrenching her line in contentious lyricism, and her brave attempt to dislodge it from the shackles of rigid binarity, while keeping the verse seemingly untainted and tame.
- 8 As per Derrida’s use of the term catachresis in his interview with Richard Kearney (10–11).
26Indicative of Richards’s utilization of the microstructural rhetorical tool catachresis in “Prince Tatters” is the line “Left it right there” (as opposed to removing the use of catachresis in the microstructural form of “My Japanese Fan”). Wrenching words from one image, Richards hastens to completely abuse it, turning it into another. What at first seems like the poet’s nimble poetic language is disavowed by the ambiguous “left” and “right.” The coalescence of two juxtaposing forces, inverse as they may be, forms a monstrous androgynous8 edifice of intertwined images. Referring to these images as a monstrosity finds support in Derrida’s contention that catachresis is a violent distortion of language—a monstrosity that operates as a rupture from conventional meaning. The phrase “Left it right” further exacerbates the ambiguity, as “left” serves as an adverb, a noun, and a verb with multiple meanings. “Left” denotes both a direction and a state of abandonment, while “right” indicates the location of the coat. While both “left” and “right” operate as spatial orientations, the signifier “right” additionally connotes just, or fair, and “left” is also what is not “right,” what is wrong. Left also functions as the past participle of “leave” signifying “quitting, vacating a place,” that is, leaving that place empty and chancing a peek into the abyss, abusing the lyrical formation.
27Simultaneously, loss, indexed via poetic means, is reduced to four times “it” in the first two stanzas, thrice in the first—“Over the hedge he threw it; / Into the river it fell kerslap! / Stupid old thing to do it!” (ll. 2–4)—and once in the second: “Playing, he did not need it;” (l. 11), further manifesting the trauma by distancing the “cap” and the “coat.” Richards’s ability to turn the lofty into the inferior enhances the atmospheric distress, while wavering between the active voice (“Little Prince Tatters has lost his cap!”) and the passive voice (“Into the river it fell”). Also, matters of grave importance (the ball) are juxtaposed with matters of very little significance (trifles). These examples of the constant play between diametric opposites, “left” vs. “right,” and active against passive, inform Richards’s tendency to tread a tight rope between ensconcing her poetic endeavor in past traumatic experiences and a hesitant attempt to pull it out of those experiences. Through the prism of the androgyny motif as the impetus in “Prince Tatters,” Richards shuttles back and forth between the binary restraints of the princely attired boy with his “gay little cap with its eagle plume” (l. 6) and “new little coat with its buttons bright;” (l. 17). In doing so, she illuminates an underlying layer of incestuous abuse, specifically, the case of a boy who does not assume the symbolic role of the father (the “name-of-the-father”), which inevitably leads to incestuous damnation. High and low paradoxically and bewilderingly swirl in the line, together accentuating the boy’s ambiguous sexuality. Two clashing points of view, of “Mother” and “Nurse” who fancy regalia on the one hand, and of the boy who abhors it on the other—“‘One cannot be thinking all day of such matters! / Trifles are trifles!’ says little Prince Tatters” (ll. 7–8)— heighten the instability and open the poetic arena to catachrestic mayhem.
- 9 Deutsch contends that in the function of reproduction women attain a discharge of the anxiety attac (...)
28Richards further galvanizes complications of the scene by introducing “the nanny-goat” (l. 13), a female goat. “Nanny-goat” relates to a common practice in the nineteenth century to let children suckle directly from goats’ udders (Valenze 159). According to psychoanalyst (and Freud’s contemporary) Helene Deutsch, the mother, who suffers extreme anxiety and loss following child birth, can resume her unity with the child through breastfeeding (417).9 Alluding to the mother-child dyadic relations through the act of breastfeeding, while at the same time leaving the act to the nanny-goat and completely denuding the scene of the mother, the poet distances the glimpse into the incestual chasm and exhibits her dexterity in undermining the line. Yet again, loss and incest merge to tilt the poetic landscape to a catachrestic dominant macrostructural pathway that corrupts the scene while trying to mend it. Richards does not only produce innovative forms of language, but also sidesteps rigid linguistic practices, indexed by the catachresis examples of old phrases made new such as “nanny-goat” and biting blend phrases such as “Prince Tatters,” thereby mocking any attempt to coerce an immutable past use.
29Various rhetorical devices illustrate the traumatic experiences of the protagonists, and ward off the experiences exposed by peeking into the abyss of the real. Catachresis, as I have shown, is utilized in both “My Japanese Fan” and “Prince Tatters.” While serving as a macrostructural rhetorical figure in both, it takes a central microstructural role only in “Prince Tatters.” In contrast, anamorphosis emerges exclusively in “My Japanese Fan,” opening up new interpretative possibilities.
- 10 Lacan illustrates this phenomenon by means of Hans Holbein’s painting The Ambassadors, which confor (...)
30In “My Japanese Fan,” anamorphosis is embodied through the androgyny that dominates the poem’s catachrestic macrostructural framework. Anamorphosis effects a distortion and reshapes the narrative, pushing it away from the expected and conventional. In the poetic arena, there can be only one version of the figure on the fan, but it never crystallizes for the speaker nor for the reader. This clash of scenes that cannot be observed at the same time is a poetic version of the event of anamorphosis in a picture, where an element in the picture remains an unrecognizable blot when looked at from one angle but becomes a recognizable object from another perspective. The oscillation between man/woman and him/her reinforces this shift from the proper, with the fan metaphor representing the unsayable within the visual field. That is, the child’s fears and uncertainty are embodied in the figure on the fan. Thus, the poet utilizes what amounts to a form of rupture in the scopic field, analogous to anamorphosis in painting, as a tool that manifests the disturbance in the poetic domain.10 Suddenly, the world is rendered wavering between two points of view that can never be reconciled. In the world of the poem, the fan and the unknown figure painted on it become the object, which causes a shift in perspective and implicate us as readers in the plot by reminding us of our own lack, of the fact that the symbolic order is separated from the materiality of the real by a fragile border only. Richards’s focus on the fan then, completely undercuts the nonsensical atmosphere of the line and “reflects our own nothingness” (Lacan, Seminar XI 92).
31Another rhetorical technique utilized both in “My Japanese Fan” and “Prince Tatters” is repetition. Repetition relates to repetition compulsion, a concept tied to satisfaction in suffering, as Lacan terms it, and to what can halt or drain it. Repetition takes what is unsayable and makes it more bearable, in other words, transmutes it to the letter, via writing. At the same time, repetition works to void excitation. In “My Japanese Fan,” by way of repeating the signifier “friend,” for instance, the subject lifts what had been for her unsayable from the domain of the real to the realm of the symbolic via writing the trauma again and again. In Freudian terms, the rewriting helps progressively void excitation; Freud likens the rewriting to a photograph being copied again and again until it fades into almost nothingness (“Letter 52” 235). Rewriting thus also reconciles instances of uncertainty, as in repeating the signifier “perhaps,” with the need to eclipse the child’s own transience.
32In “My Japanese Fan” Richards uses anaphora (repetition of the same word at the beginning of successive clauses or verses) (Lanham 11), repeating the word “and” five times at the beginning of as many lines. Those instances are not merely coordinating conjunctions, as in “[a]nd every morning when I wake” (l. 13), or in “[a]nd so I never can” (l. 22); within the contextuality of the lines, the signifier “and” points to simultaneity, to co-occurrence that contributes to a sense of amassing, suffocating, and unremitting pressure: a breathless rush toward a catastrophe of inhumed trauma led by copious “ands,” disguised under a veil of a “pleasant” smile and “friendly ‘How-d’ye-do?’” (ll. 15–16). Nevertheless, the repeated writing and rewriting of “and” depressurizes the anxiety, making possible the elusion of the abyss.
33Likewise, in “Prince Tatters,” the repetition of phrases such as “[t]rifles are trifles” or “[l]ittle Prince Tatters has lost his” retroactively activates the unyielding primal wounding effects of the experience that is sustained by the boy at the loss of pieces of his apparel and his attempt to declare those losses “trifles.” At the same time the repetition empties the enjoyment of suffering by the fact that it is subjectified by dint of being written. The act of writing gives a name to what before could not be named, subsisted as a horrifying real, which now becomes symbolized and as such, more bearable. Interestingly, the example of “[t]rifles are trifles” doubles the repetition of the word “trifle” by iterating it twice and then repeating it twice again, effectively raising the repetition to the second power. Aligning the repetition of the consonant “t” in the noun “matters” with “tatters” (emphasis mine) enhances displays of traumatic experiences, which needed to be expelled by means of writing and rewriting and are further heightened by the alliteration and sonority of the words “Trifles are trifles, little, buttons, bright” (emphasis mine). In this manner, Richards lays stress on trivialities, making “Prince Tatters” a nonsensical rhyme, and dismissing any attempt at solemnity: “’One cannot be thinking all day of such matters! / Trifles are trifles!’ says little Prince Tatters” (ll. 7–8).
- 11 To explain poetic writing in his later teachings, Lacan formulates that for neurotics it always cre (...)
34Still the polar opposite of frivolity and seriousness betrays the poetic struggle between nonsense and what Lacan calls sense. Lacan formulates that poetry is what creates an effect of sense (Seminar XXIV, 124). At the same time, Lacan enunciates that density of rhetorical figures causes poetry to generate a “hole effect” (124),11 an opening for multiple interpretations via rhetorical devices, rendering the line opaque. By means of the rhetorical forms (repetition, anaphora, sonority, and alliteration) Richards thus achieves a hole effect, an effect of emptying all sense (nonsense), whereby vacating excess enjoyment. And though nonsensical and outside of sense (through the very use of formal poetic devices), “Prince Tatters” manages still to generate an effect of sense, that of the trauma of loss, therefore catachrestic in essence.
- 12 The crier” in the poem alludes to the same passage in Hamlet where the word “tatters” appears. Like (...)
35Revisiting the rhetorical device anaphora, Richards dives into the knotty depth of Prince Tatters’ struggle to become a subject by disavowing the feminine reign while at the same time causing uncertainty. Thrice repeating the word “now,” this anaphoric utilization creates a framework of amalgamated layers of evolving effects, exhibiting the boy’s assumption of responsibility, while simultaneously generating a hole effect. In the first stanza the speaker’s position “[n]ow Mother may sigh and Nurse may fume” (l. 5), is rewritten in variation in the second stanza: “Now Mother and Nurse may search till night” (l. 16); however, the third and fourth stanzas see a major shift in the poetic stance: “Now raise the neighborhood quickly, do! / And send for the crier and constable, too!” (ll. 24–25).12
- 13 It is safe to assume that at the nineteenth century those positions were all filled by men.
36Still utilizing the rhetorical figure anaphora (“now”), Richards deftly excises “Mother” and “Nurse” from the verse in the third stanza in a semantic deviance, which introduces the name-of-the-father through the “crier and constable” (l. 25).13 Thus abusing her own rhetorical strategies, the poet employs the abuse to propel change within the poetic topography. Being catachrestic in nature due to its aberration from the previous lines, the changed last couplet, “‘Trifles are trifles, but serious matters, / They must be seen to,’ says little Prince Tatters” (ll. 23–24), is also what coerces the assumption of responsibility, and therefore underscores the poem’s own intentions. Forfeiting the alliance with Mother and forming an allegiance with “the crier and constable,” the child can find a partial cure, further enhanced by means of applying the past participle verb “seen.” Whereas the phrase “seen to” does not mean “see,” it nevertheless encapsulates the verb “see” while literally meaning “something that has to be done.” At the very end of the poem, then, the boy does not merely see his own suffering, though partially only for the screen erected by the phrasal “seen to,” but also knows that something must be done, a knowledge which allows him to assume subjectivity.
37Catachresis, then, can be warded off by iteration, which, as psychoanalysis teaches us, replicates the trauma with a difference. As such, it reduces the trauma’s crushing power. Such differences in iteration are prevalent in both “My Japanese Fan” and “Prince Tatters.” In the first, the word “very” in the pair “very queer” (l. 6) is italicized, denoting exceeding “queerness” to the adjective; the word “little” is assigned to “friend” in the first line of “My Japanese Fan,” in an attempt to belittle the peril posed by the figure on the fan; thus “upon a fan” (l. 2) is expanded to “upon a paper fan” (l. 20). Transforming the indefinite article “fan” into a more specific “paper fan,” the poem erodes its threat, specifying its vulnerable inferiority, its “paper” thinness, lifting the child from the void to a possibility of cure. In “Prince Tatters,” the last couplet in each stanza is an example of the progression of change and growth:
‘One cannot be thinking all day of such matters!
Trifles are trifles!’ says little Prince Tatters.
….
But ‘Coat sleeves or shirt sleeves, how little it matters!
Trifles are trifles!’ says little Prince Tatters.
….
‘Trifles are trifles, but serious matters,
They must be seen to,’ says little Prince Tatters.
(ll. 7–8; 18–19; 26–27)
38These alterations transform the trauma, soften the blow, and reduce the traumatic mortification.
- 14 Freud suggests that emendations in the repressed instinctual process are a welcome enriching and va (...)
39As Freud suggests, these repetitions with a difference allow a partial cure for the subject.14 Reinforcing this viewpoint in his essay “The Uncanny,” Freud parallels repetition to the double and argues that the tendency to repeat in children is an insurance against the power of death (235). In “My Japanese Fan,” the power of death and the child’s confrontation with mortality due to illness is so overwhelming that the child must suppress it by iterating words. These words—“she,” “he,” “man,” “woman”—not only force the unveiling of the Japanese figure’s gender by metaphorically lifting its robes but also expose the deeper fears the child harbors—namely, mortality and death, which are intertwined with a preoccupation with sex. This undercurrent subtly gives way to a flood of unsettling depictions of open sexuality. As Lacan posits, sex is at once a struggle against death and its sign (Seminar XII 285), unsettling the line between life and death. Consequent upon such bold flares of sexuality fortified by repetition and death, the line slides to catachrestic fields. But rather than timidly withdraw from the exposed sexuality, the speaker courageously wards off the abusing forces via the last poetic quatrain, making a loud exclamation, completely changing the lyrical tone: “But that, alas! can never be” (l. 21), surprisingly resuming the position of metaphorical dominant macrostructure, lifting it from the abysmal catachrestic one.
40Lacan formulates, after Freud, that sex is what shapes the child’s curious force of life (Seminar XII 286) in alignment with the spirit of children’s rhyme. By way of words, the act of writing poetry, of taking the pain from the real to the symbolic, then, the adult poet, who gives voice to her childhood experiences, ensures that the reality of death does not intrude upon her childhood existence, therefore ending the poem with forceful lines that repeat with a difference: “But that, alas! Can never be; / And so I never can / Know whether he’s a woman / Or whether she’s a man” (ll. 21–24). These vigorous words chase away injuring catachrestic forces. Likewise, “Prince Tatters,” too, ends with a very potent stanza that lifts the pain from the real to the symbolic, ascertaining comprehension and acknowledgment, and making hesitant steps away from nonsense. The little prince has come a long way “to find it” (l. 22).
41To conclude, Richards’s conceptual poetic practice often expresses brazen and radical ideas, traced in the poems discussed above while exhibiting the power of poetry to heal and transform, if partially. Stripping the metaphor of its fundamentals in both “My Japanese Fan” and “Prince Tatters,” and collapsing the boundaries signaling at the failure of the poetic domain to operate as screen to mask the unbearable, Richards repeats what is imbued in the catachrestic spheres of the poems, the androgynous “friend” in “My Japanese Fan” and the exposed loss in “Prince Tatters.” Doing so, repeating by means of writing the experiences and the distress, Richards allows her protagonists to indulge in suffering and halt the enjoyment at the same time. Utilizing thematic and rhetorical means, Richards’s poems can be seen as a macrostructure mechanism of destruction, a dominant whose aim is to dismantle the unity suggested by the metaphors turned catachreses. Yet this very dominant also partially succeeds in curbing the disintegration by means of rhetorical tools.
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