Multimodality, Poetry and Poetics

Richard Andrews

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781315523873
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This groundbreaking work takes multimodality studies in a new direction by applying multimodal approaches to the study of poetry and poetics. The book examines poetry's visual and formal dimensions, applying framing theory to such case studies as Aristotle's Poetics and Robert Lowell's "The Heavenly Rain", to demonstrate both the implied, due to the form's unique relationship with structure, imagery, and rhythm, and explicit forms of multimodality at work, an otherwise little-explored research strand of multimodality studies. The volume explores the theoretical implications of a multimodal approach to poetry and poetics to other art forms and fields of study, making this essential reading for students and scholars working at the intersection of language and communication, including multimodality, discourse analysis, and interdisciplinary literary studies.

1 Classical Precedents and Contemporary Multimodality

Introduction

This chapter draws on Aristotle’s Poetics as well as other classical sources to explore what they imply about multimodality. It also refers to the Rhetoric in order to make the connection between speech, writing and other modes such as gesture, movement and image. Such public communication has an important bearing on the conception of poetics and poetry that runs through the present book: poetry is seen not as a merely private, individual voice, but as an array of public voices whose function is partly to persuade the reader/audience. Despite the fact that Aristotle did not write much about the lyric form, it is discussed here (his focus was on drama, plot, characters). The classical emphasis on beauty—the aesthetic dimension—is explored, as is the emphasis on form and genre. As an example of multimodality in action, two versions of Blake’s poem ‘London’ are discussed. The account of classical poetics and discussion of Blake are followed by a review of studies of existing applications of contemporary multimodality.

Aristotle’s Poetics

There is a statement close to the start of Aristotle’s On the Art of Poetry—also known as the Poetics, from its Latin title De Poetica— that could come, with some adjustment for contemporary vocabulary and the vagaries of translation, from a book on multimodality: the major poetic genres differ not only in form but also “either in using different media for the representation, or in representing different things, or in representing them in entirely different ways” (Aristotle 1965: 31). The first difference could be re-phrased as “using different modes and media for the representation”.

Behind Aristotle’s thinking is a belief in poetry as imitation: the notion that the thing to be represented is outside language, and language operates to express the thing through imitation. There is no conception of the ‘verbal construct’, let alone a ‘multimodal construct’. Nevertheless, the notion that poetry can not only take different forms/genres but also operate in different modes/media is established at the very beginning of the work. Indeed, in the first chapter on the media of poetic imitation, it is asserted that “imitation is produced by means of rhythm, language, and music, these being used either separately or in combination” (1965: 32). Aristotle’s thinking here is not systematic in its categorization: rhythm is a different category from language or music. Rhythm is the relation of movement to time. Language itself needs to be broken down into spoken or written language. But the characterization of ‘imitation’ as being represented by a combination of rhythm, language and music suggests, at the very least, multimodal awareness if not a fully fledged conception of multimodality.

In choosing to focus on dramatic and epic poetry in the Poetics, Aristotle was concentrating on the emerging major public genres of his time, which had political as well as aesthetic significance, rather like the plays of Shakespeare at the turn of the seventeenth century with their multi-layered, metaphysical and political references. For the moment, let us define exactly how Aristotle has focused on these genres from a poetics point of view. Later, the book will return to the rhetorical and political dimensions. The art of poetry for Aristotle has broad reference. It refers to artistic expression and includes plot and narrative structure. It thus has closer parallels to what could be now termed something more specific within literary stylistics: narratology. At the same time, it takes in the area now considered distinctive features of poetry: metricality, rhythm, the ‘music’ of language. In addition, it focusses specifically on tragic and epic narrative poetry. This specific focus gives Aristotle his own contemporary context, and although he uses the foundation of his discussion for generalizing principles, the foundation is, in relation to contemporary poetics, narrow.

Within that narrow spectrum—tragedy, comedy, epic—Aristotle identifies six elements of tragedy. Two are modes/media of communication: diction and song. There is another that “involves the manner of presentation” (1965: 39): spectacle. The other three are the ‘objects’ of representation: thought, plot and character. The first three are modal: they could be identified in current terms as speech/dialogue, song and the visual (including still images; e.g. the theatrical set and moving images, the movement of the actors). In an aesthetic theory that foregrounds imitation, the elements that take precedence are plot, character and thought, and the other modal elements are merely expressive or representational. In a contemporary multimodal aesthetic, there is no ‘substance’ that is framed within the expressive elements. Rather, the composition of elements within a frame provides a meaning/modal nexus, creating a situation in which the elements of communication are more equal than in Aristotelian theory. What is presented as art is the representation of a possible world. Even with photography, the framing of the image sets it apart from the real world and demands our special attention. But the real world, in its moment-to-moment unfolding, is also a world of possibilities. Within this philosophy of possible worlds, multimodality and rhetoric operate to define meaning. Poetics operates as a sub-category of rhetoric, and poetry is a concrete example of poetics in action.

To debate which is the better art form—tragedy or epic—would be pointless from a multimodal perspective. Each has its own affordances.

The closest Horace (1965) comes to commentary on the potential multimodality of poetry, or any more explicit statement, is through analogy:

A poem is like a painting: the closer you stand to this one the more it will impress you, whereas you have to stand a good distance from that one; this one demands a rather dark corner, but that one needs to be seen in full light, and will stand up to the keen-eyed scrutiny of the art critic; this one pleased you only the first time you saw it, but that one will go on giving pleasure however often it is looked at.

(1965: 91–2)

The point here is more about framing and perspective than a comparison or combination of modes. The statement has also been used to illustrate the notion of ut pictura poesis, again an analogistic proposition. It says little more than words in a poem invoke the imagination and, conversely, painting may be seen as having the suggestive and interpretive intensity of poetry. See Rensselaer 1967 and further discussion in Chapter 4 of the present book.

Possible World Semantics and Modal Logic

Classical rhetoric and poetics did not have much to say about modes, other than in relation to genres. If ‘mode’ is taken, in its most basic sense, as a ‘way’ of doing something, then modes of transport, fashion modes (and its models) and modes of being can all be classed under the term ‘mode’. ‘Mode’, in these senses, means ‘type’ or ‘way’ or ‘means’. It is essentially dynamic and concerned with actual or potential movement, even in its apparently most static senses of ‘state’ or ‘dimension’ (as in ‘modes of being’).

More specifically, in philosophy, a modal is an expression such as ‘probably’ or ‘necessarily’ that is used to qualify the truth of a statement. In linguistics, a modal verb is used to indicate likelihood, possibility, provisionality and expressed intention. For example, the verbs ‘can/could’, ‘may/might’, ‘shall/should’ and ‘will/would’ all come under the category of modal verbs and are always used in conjunction with more active verbs, hence their further definition as modal auxiliary verbs.

The close association between modal logic in philosophy and possible world semantics¹ in the second half of the twentieth century found application in poetics in the work of Eco (1984), Pavel (1986) and Doležel (1998). Eco’s notion is that a literary work cannot be seen as representing a single possible world but “as a machine for producing possible worlds” [italics in original] (1984: 246). His notion is based on the idea of the literary work as a process tool rather than a framed artistic work. Pavel’s contribution was to perceive that a literary text was not dependent on the validity of individual propositions; that literariness, unlike the scientific approach, did not eliminate false propositions; and that literature must be examined from three different perspectives: the semantics of salient structures (meaning), the pragmatics of cultural tradition (context) and the stylistics of textual constraint (style). Doležel, through his notion of ‘minimal departure’, emphasizes the proximity of fictional words to those of the ‘real’ world and their ontological fullness as objects in the world.

Literary conceptions of possible worlds have exploited the emancipation of possible world semantics from modal logic. Possible worlds have been loosely designated as imagined worlds which have their own—largely narrative—grammars. Little work has been done on drama or poetry.

Most useful for the purposes of exploring the relationship between multimodality and poetics is the difference between the concretist and the abstractionist perspectives on modal discourse. From the concretist perspective, all that exists is the full extent of the real world and its presence in space and/or time. Possible worlds are possible other worlds in time/space dimensions, including the actual. In other words, what is happening here and now in a limited space could have been different and is related to all other nexuses of actuality. The closest analogy in fictional terms is the real-world novel, the kitchen-sink drama and the a-rhythmical, journalistic, descriptive poem. From an abstractionist perspective, on the other hand, what could be the case is the case. Its focus is on states of affairs with consistency: an example would be a fictional construct with internal consistency. An individual, from an abstractionist point of view, exists in a number of possible worlds, and these actualities are of a different order from those of the concretist.²

The best way to see these two perspectives is to conceive of them as the two ends of a spectrum of possibilities. Some worlds are closer and more proximate to the real, tangible, actual, concrete world. Others are further away and have their own internal consistency and logic. All possibilities on this spectrum could be seen in terms of modes of perception and being. Multimodality would thus have to address the concertina-like presence of more than one point on the spectrum being invoked by the fictional work: novel, story, poem or play. Such concertina-like compression and expansion is also akin to the ‘layering’ effect described and analyzed by Domingo (2011).

Genre

The precepts, suggestions and comments of classical literacy criticism are based on a fascination with the emergence of genres within the culture/society of the time: poetry as opposed to everyday language; tragedy and epic as grand, inclusive genres; and comedy as closer to the quotidian. What can genre theory, both in its formulations of genre-as-social-action and genre-as-text-type, offer in terms of an exploration of the relationship between multimodality and poetics?

First, and most simply, poetry is an example of a text-type (we will be exploring the parameters of that text-type in the course of this book) and for the most part is distinguishable from prose or ‘everyday speech’. In one sense, it is a meta-genre embracing a plethora of genres, such as free verse, metrical verse and blank verse. In a taxonomy of poetic types, the smorgasbord is a better metaphor than the hierarchical tree. Individual poems can borrow from a range of types and styles. So, for example, a blank verse sonnet, as in Lowell’s Notebook (1970) and History (1973) or a combination of blank, half-rhymes and full rhymes in Heaney’s ‘Glanmore sonnets’ (in Field Work 1979) are variations on the Shakespearian or Petrarchan sonnet. These are all sub-genres of the overarching textual genre ‘poetry’.

Second, the picture is more complex if poetry is considered as a genre in social action. From this broader perspective, poems happen in the interaction between the poet, the text and the reader or the listener. Freed from the confines of the written text, poems can be performed orally and read by the author or by others; they can be recorded and listened to via different media; they are tightly framed works that take their place in a multimodal context, whether they are printed on a white page (and surrounded by white space) or they are delivered or performed orally in a pub, at a funeral, in a concert hall or at a book group or literary festival. These wider social framings help to determine the meaning that is generated between rhetor, artwork and audience, and which constitute the more central topic in the present book.

Rhetoric

Aristotle’s narrow definition of rhetoric as the ‘art of persuasion’, as opposed to the present definition of it as ‘the arts of discourse’, was shared by rhetoricians from Gorgias (c483–375 BC) to the classical periods in Greece and Rome. Although this is not the place for a history or exposition of classical rhetoric, two points must be made: first, oral rhetoric of the classical period manifested itself in oratory which involved more than mere speech. Whether for delivery in the law courts, public gatherings or for ‘display’, the practical operation of rhetoric must have been accompanied by gesture and movement and informed by audience reaction. That is to say, it was dialogic and multimodal. Second, observations on the use of rhythm in oratory suggested that prose should be rhythmical rather than metrical. This latter distinction, operating at the borders of prose and poetry, and, in parallel, at the borders of rhetoric and poetics, is indicative of a world of communication in which the poetic played a social and political part as well as an aesthetic one.

Other elements of rhetorical theory need not concern us in an exploration of multimodality and poetics, such as the relationship between claim and proof, the three kinds of rhetoric (deliberative, forensic and epideictic), the characteristics of the good orator (wisdom, virtue and goodwill), the play on the emotions and the categorical excesses of textbook rhetoric. Nothing in the present book suggests that reader response, or the primacy of the audience in interpretation, is key to exploring the relationship between multimodality and poetics.

But other elements, particularly those addressed in Book III of the Rhetoric, are crucial because they address the how as opposed to the what. One of these elements is composition or the art of arrangement; another is the importance of rhythm in composition and a third is narrative. If these three elements alone are considered, it can be seen that one is concerned with the spatial arrangement of elements of a composition and that the other two are concerned with the arrangement of words in time.

Spatial arrangements of elements are important because meaning is generated more in the relations of the constituent elements in space than from each element itself. An individual element can have multiple meanings; it can be hard to pin down. By locating it alongside other elements, a more precise meaning emerges. If these elements consist not only of words but also of gestures, visual images, sounds and movements, then the meaning that emerges, shaped within the frame that is chosen to separate text from context, becomes clearer. Spatial arrangement is particularly important in poetry—unlike prose—because relative positioning of words is used to generate semantic, musical and choreographic meaning. The emphasis is more on the words themselves as vehicles of meaning than is the case in prose. Both composer and reader are asked to attend more carefully and more intensely to the relationships between the words on the page, or in the air.

Arrangements of words (and of other elements) in time inevitably set up a rhythm, whether in prose or verse. This rhythm works subliminally in the communication in question, affecting emotion and therefore response. The effect is not unlike that of music. Music arranges sounds in time and speaks of the relationship between human perception of time and other less personal models of time, such as metronomic time or ‘universal’ time. But its arrangement is always deliberate and significant. There are specific examples in Aristotle, the most interesting of which is the paean. In its proportionality of three to two, it is related to other metrical rhythms (which have different proportionalities), but “it is the only one of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Classical Precedents and Contemporary Multimodality
• 2 Poetry in Multimodal Presentations
• 3 The Forms and Functions of Rhythm in Poetry: From Metrical to Free Verse
• 4 Imagery in Poetry: Implicit and Explicit
• 5 The Framing of a Poem
• 6 The Basis of a New Poetics
• 7 Implications for Poetics
• 8 A Further Look at the Imaginative and Fictive
• 9 What Part Do Rhetoric and Politics Play in the Relationship between Multimodality and Poetics?
• 10 A New Approach to Literary Study?
• 11 Poetry, Writing Process and the New Poetics
• 12 Implications for Multimodality and Learning Theory
• References and Bibliography
• Index