Category: Metonymy

Three Words: Quirks and Perks

On why Anne Carson’s quote “Perfection is round” is special.

aaron-burden https://unsplash.com/photos/xtIYGB0KEqc

Quote: Perfection is round.
—Anne Carson, Red Doc>

Perfection is simplicity: As of 3rd September, the Quote throws up six results on Google, all of which are Carson’s citations. In today’s age that translates to: she said it first.

Three words, two ordinary nouns and the most frequent verb of the English language in its most frequent form. And it’s not nonsense.

Let’s start with the verb.

Even though “to be” is often used to equate and identify, simple sentences centring around it are not obviously semantically symmetric: round is perfection, means something else. Think: the circle, the sphere, the sun—often taken as symbols of the ideal, the perfect, the godly. In both the Quote and in round is perfection, the subject complement states a property of the subject. Indeed, perfection and round are—as Carson says of two utterly different things—parts of each other / although not parts of a / whole.

Therefore, is is a simple verb that can denote mutual inclusion without denoting equivalence.

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Apple’s Metalepsis

Screenshot of Apple’s website on 29.06.2017. Apple’s new operating system focuses on improvements for iPad.

 

It is entirely plausible that some people have not heard of Apple, so let me just say that Apple Inc. is a forty-one-year-old technology company from California that designs computers, tablets, phones, and that names them MacBooks, iPads, iPhones. Theirs is the logo that looks like Snow White had a go at it.

Today’s Quote is Apple’s tagline for their upcoming operating system, iOS 11.

Quote: 

iOS 11
A giant step for iPhone.
A monumental leap for iPad.

A bit familiar, a bit grand, a bit silly. Let’s see why.

What makes the Quote quiver?

Resonance.
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Big Silver Pin

markus-kauppinen https://unsplash.com/search/pin?photo=2W0feTQOor0
If there’s no silver, settle for gold

Quote: 

It happened by accident. Geryon’s grandmother came to visit and fell off the bus. / The doctors put her together again with a big silver pin. / Then she and her pin had to lie still in Geryon’s room / for many months.

Today’s Quote from Anne Carson‘s Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse could also have been an excerpt from a prose piece. (I talked about the structure of her novel in verse in Dark Smell of Velvet)

A few observations without knowing any context:

  • Four sentences, four (or more) facts.
  • The tone is emotionless, straightforward.
  • There is an awkward, creepy feeling between the lines.

A bit of context explains some of the above: Geryon is a small boy, who is also a red-winged monster; the close third person narrator is saying why Geryon had to move out of his room and into his brother’s. The Quote is heavily filtered through this unusual boy’s mind, with the purpose of not only providing the back story, but more importantly, providing insight into his worldview.

What makes the Quote quiver?

Figurative language delivered as fact.

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Ambulatory Oxymoron

You don’t have to write literary fiction to justify using figures of speech. Metaphor and oxymoron in China Miéville’s short story.

Death at the lectern; we’d have a lot to learn

Quote: The disappearing body quickly became shorthand. Anything lost was considered pocketed by our ambulatory corpse on its way home. Unexpected noises in the corridors were the incompetent creeping of the revenant.

This is China Miéville’s disappearing body from The Design, published in his collection of short stories Three Moments of an Explosion. A body has disappeared from the dissection room where medical students study anatomy, and we are hearing about the atmosphere that developed thereafter. A morbid setting, but these are students of medicine, who have learned, perforce, to joke about their environment.

What makes the Quote quiver?

Deadpan delivery of compressed paradox.

Continue reading “Ambulatory Oxymoron”