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By Laura (Riding) Jackson and Schuyler B. Jackson
Edited by William Harmon |
"The publication of Rational Meaning: A New Foundation for the Definition of Words brings to completion one of the most aesthetically and philosophically singular projects of twentieth-century American poetry. No North American or European poet of this century has created a body of work that reflects more deeply on the inherent conflicts between truth telling and the inevitable artifice of poetry than Laura (Riding) Jackson." --Charles Bernstein, from the introduction.
Existing only in manuscript since the 1940s but enjoying an underground reputation among friends and advocates, this primary document by one of the most original and influential of American poets and thinkers is now being published as Rational Meaning , Laura (Riding) Jackson's testament of the necessity of living for truth. Begun as a dictionary and thesaurus in the 1930s, the work developed into a fundamental reevaluation of language itself. Riding, in close collaboration with her husband, continued this monumental project over the succeeding decades, completing it after his death in 1968. The work, which she regarded as a "Magna Carta of the human mind," has heretofore been seen by only a handful of people. Yet the recent resurgence of interest in Laura Riding is nourishing the growth of scholarship and study, in which this culmination of a life's work will play its part as her true significance becomes more widely understood.
Epigraph
by Schuyler B. Jackson (1967)
Suppose that words do have meanings, meanings of their own. (Which is the reality.) What would the consequences be, if words were words only in having meanings peculiarly, inseparably, necessarily, theirs? (Which is the presupposition of language .)
If one used words as possessed of their meanings so thoroughly that they had no existence except as meaning what they meant, one would have to--in the use of them--mean what they meant, have in mind to express what they expressed. Otherwise, one would be, while seemingly at one with the sense of one's words, perpetrating a pretence with them, or, at best, putting oneself through an exercise in self-frustration.
But, do we not all mean the meanings of our words in using them--the pretenders, and those who say what they do not mean from some morbid inhibitedness, excepted? Do we not, with these exceptions, and allowance--of course--for accidental ignorance or misk nowledge in the case of a particular word here and there, always do this?
Do we not--on the whole, and almost always--mean our words? No, we do not. Our minds are only partly given over to our words. And the human world as we know it (disordered, distracted) is the result of our being, thus, only partly responsible occupants of it. What would that world be if we used words entirely as, by their meanings, they call on us to use them, is an unknown. The aim of this book is to suggest some of the difference, besides indicating ways of making the changes.
Excerpt
by Laura (Riding) Jackson and Schuyler B. Jackson
To "know a word" is a familiar expression. The experience of knowing a word differs from that of knowing a fact. The thing known, in the case of a word, exists--once known--as a component of one's working mental equipment, as something with which one thin ks. A known word is one's own word. It is also a fixture of a common lore of rational distinctions of tried mental workability. The issue posed by the early linguisticians, that words are not things, was, in its new common-sense attractiveness, a factitio us issue. There is no issue as to words and things, from the linguistic point of view, except in regard to knowledge: the knowledge of a word is differently constituted from that of the knowledge of a thing.
The material that forms the knowledge of things consists of identifications of subjects of human consciousness. The material that forms the knowledge of words is of the order of consciousness itself: not mere identifications are involved, applications of consciousness, but consciousness self-organized for its control of its functioning as responsible intelligence. Language is this medium of control, is the apparatus of human intelligence. Lexicographers have charge of acquainting the speakers of a languag e with the greatly varied, ever consistently sustainable exercise of their intelligence of which their language renders them capable. Their task may be described as one of making the word-resources of language reliably available to the intelligence--or pr eserving to the human mind the accumulated evidence of its capabilities of intelligent functioning stored in language.
Contrarily to the stress put on change in contemporary linguistics as a primary process in word-meaning, and, as such, a primary characteristic of language, it is the hold of permanence in the midst of change that most marks the general character of meani ng in language, and the general processes of rational coherence by which a language stands in readiness to serve the intelligence. The knowing of words is a condition of multiple awareness governed by self-awareness; and the unity of the two awarenesses r eflects the government of the variable by the invariable (which is, surely, the nature of ultimate law). Language is steeped in the fortitudes of permanence. It should be the purpose of lexicographers to make a direct linguistic approach to words; and the y cannot do this as historians of change. To do this, they must penetrate through the shifting to the persisting, and discover the features of rational order, the principles of relations, that make words into language and give a language its powers of end urance amidst the intricacies of vocabularistic amplification and variation attending linguistic growth.
There is no categorical difference between defining a word and knowing what it means. To know what a word means one must have continuous presence in the field of diversified awareness covered by languages, and, with the help of this experience, locate (an d keep located) the meaning of the word in it. Located, the meaning is an immediately recognizable and definitely describable distinction. The ordinary knowing of a word and the lexicographical defining of it employ equally the human ability to apprehend the nature of human experience and comprehend the distinctions manifesting the kind of experience it is. The dictionary is, ideally, the organon of common human knowledge. One that answered to the ideal would be a much more simple work, humanly, than the dictionary of the existent sort is, and, also, a much more complex one, intellectually. To know words is to know the meanings of words. To know the meanings of words is to know words as language. Knowing or defining a single word involves knowing the lang uage of which it is a component. To know a language is to perceive the world as a human being. The knowledge of language domesticates the single mind to the world-sized, all-comprehensive human experience; it initiates the mind into a lore of rational dis tinctions of confirmed relevance to the experience of human beings in their relationship to one another as existing in common self-consciousness in the common field of existence called a world.
The belief that the knowledge of language is the central human knowledge might meet with wide, vague acquiescence without meeting with specific agreement. This conception itself was not advanced with specific belief by anyone until Charles M. Doughty (of whom we tell in the early part of this book) made his call for something better than what passed for adequate knowledge of language represented language as being. Holding words to be precious essences of human perception, each distinct in meaning and comp etent as an expressive utterance, he viewed language as a communal treasure to be loyally cared for, and used with a reverent sense of its worth. In his plan for the redemption of the English language from the debased state to which he, in his Victorian t ime, believed it to have sunk, this reverent sense of the worth of languages was to be exercised by knowledge--the knowledge of words. He dedicated himself to revealing what he judged to be the real Mother-tongue, the early modern English languag e submerged in the later--to him a compound of ignorances of words. Language, as he phrased it, lay at the root of the mental life of human beings: the loyal member of a human community must be "a well-taught lover" of its language.
The mode of common human knowledge varies from one site to another of human association formed round a sense of existence in a world: language varies--is, languages. Language is everywhere and in all times the general pattern of human knowledge, the way t he human mind deals with experience as a whole. However much languages vary in internal composition, they conform in their constitutional character: in every language, the rational distinctions that make individual words mean, and also make everything sai d in a language mean, are all relevant to the experience-span of human consciousness on a scale of entirety.
Copyright © 1997-2000 by the Board of Literary Management of the late Laura (Riding) Jackson
Updated 4 July 2000 || ottotwo@email.unc.edu