Ethics Syllepsis

Ethical Tempo of Narrative Syntax: Sylleptic Recognitions in OurMutual Friend

Garrett Stewart

Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, Volume8, Number 1, January 2010, pp. 119-145 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/pan.0.0162

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Partial Answers 8/1: 119–145 © 2010 The Johns Hopkins University Press

The Ethical Tempo of Narrative Syntax: Sylleptic Recognitions in Our Mutual Friend

Garrett StewartUniversity of Iowa

In inventing the Victorian novel with Pickwick Papers (1836), Charles Dickens — trailing clouds of Augustan wit as filtered and aerated through eighteenth-century comic fiction — has his inebriated hero, risen to the heights of attempted rhetoric in an impromptu speech, fall “simultane-ously” (19: 254) into a wheelbarrow and sound asleep — as if to say, passing at once from public view and out. Syllepsis: that figure of speech in which, typically, a predicate is understood in two different senses with separate objects, whether indirect or direct. In Pope, well before Dickens, the tea that you take when not counsel can stain your new brocade if not your honor.

Syntactically, the twinned temporal prongs of the sylleptic effect are not “simultaneous” exactly, as Dickens would have it — the opposing meanings do not coincide “at once.” Beyond any mere doubleness of literary ambiguity, syllepsis requires the textual come-again, often an ironic comeuppance, a backtracking. In its narrow miss of grammatical nonsense, syllepsis is for the most part lightly comic (with, as we shall see, notable exceptions). Its almost punning tendency results from the fact that such a rhetorical turn works only if it is discernible enough to catch hold, and be caught, in a tactical double-take.

Laughing matters aside, one can see why Derrida recruited the term syllepsis, albeit loosely, to describe Mallarmé’s hymen entre as indicat-ing both marriage and its prevention by maidenhead, consummated em-brace and the barrier it must overcome. Two polysemous lexemes, hymen standing for marriage and the membrane and entre meaning “between,” are themselves wedded under syntactic duress.1 In traditional syllepsis,

1 See Jacques Derrida on this reciprocal contradiction of reference from the aptly named “Double Session” in Dissemination (221). The différance to be lifted in the marital bond is the coming-between not of union but of its anatomical deferral. What the reciprocal cancel-lation of this phrasing amounts to, for Derrida, is in effect an unraveling (a deconstruction) of the very seam or tuck (what he likes to call the “invaginated” fold) between definition and functional context, diction and syntax.

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spanning more than a single bipolar term, a good measure of the sig-nificance restlessly resides in the fact that correlated meanings of the same phrase do not quite fit flush in a conterminous grammar. What we read is the activity of designation in process rather than its cumulative results: the signifier is kept in syntactic motion on the track and trace of its bifurcated sign function. Rather than a Janus-faced pun, syllepsis is a forking in syntactic s/pace itself. Here is narrative temporality writ out and small, its signifying force not derived from content alone but from the drive of form.

To quote the actual text from Chapter 19 of Pickwick Papers, its hero “fell into the barrow, and fast asleep, simultaneously” — where, inci-dental to the syllepsis, one understanding of “fast” (as “firmly”) gets the jump even on its speedy temporal alternative. But for its main comedy the phrasing depends on the wavering of a preposition, like the betwixtness of entre in Mallarmé, a grammatical integer not replicated in the second phase of the predicate in this case — as it would have been if occasion presented itself to describe Pickwick no sooner falling into his bed than into a dream. Dickens is full of such sylleptic gear-shifts, with or with-out explicit lexical iterations. In effect, he borrows the banter of comic dialogue from his fictional predecessors and transfuses his own discourse with it, lending character to his own narration and narrative authority to the wit, however contorted.2 By contrast, and by the protocols of quota-tion alone, a stagey and affected character in the first major English novel of the nineteenth century, Lady Delacour in Maria Edgweworth’s 1801 Belinda, deploys such phrases as part of her pose of mannered sarcasm. These frequently include the recurrence of a prepositional form, where a seeded idiom like “out of my mind” is parsed so that “out” goes two ways at once, by way of distraction and extraction: “I had been swindled out of my senses, and out of my dower” (Edgeworth 40). As the plot later thickens, she nudges along its disclosure through secondary report with a double “with”: “I am absolutely overcome with heat — and with curi-osity” (121). Only her nemesis, the disreputable Mrs. Freke, caught in a mantrap when spying on her, pushes the trope further toward Dickensian grotesquerie in insisting “that ’tis better for a lady to lose her leg than her reputation” (311).

As taken up in their more boldly disconcerting forms by Dickens, such effects represent a comic, and often satiric, habit of thought. And whether

2 For a brief discussion of this syntactic phenomenon, with different examples, see Stew-art 2001: 141–43.

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the exaggerated syntactic laxity inherent to the trope seems habitual or even compulsive by the time of Our Mutual Friend (1864–1865), it can still appear forcefully motivated at certain turns. Before concentrating on sylleptic pressure points in Dickens’s last novel, however, let us look back to another and even more classic example in his first — so famous that it is not only a recurrent dictionary example of the trope (as in Fowl-er’s English Usage, for example), second only to excerpts from Pope, but can even be quoted without citation by the philosopher Gilbert Ryle as public property.

Writes Ryle: “‘She came home in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair’ is a well-known joke based on the absurdity of conjoining terms of a differ-ent type.” It is thus a good model, in Ryle’s thinking, not for mind-body dualism itself but for the logical disaster of its hypothesis, which is also, like syllepsis, based on a “category-mistake” (22). Continuing: “It would be just as ridiculous to construct the disjunction ‘She is either in a flood of tears or in a sedan-chair’” (22). But that is exactly what “the dogma of the Ghost in the Machine does,” according to Ryle: in Cartesian dualism, mind amounts to an autonomous resident alien buried somewhere within and behind the manifest action of the body. The false premise of Carte-sianism, as Ryle puts it with that comic jogging of logic in mind, “main-tains that there are both bodies and minds” in the same sense of “are”; “that there occur physical processes and mental processes; that there are mechanical causes of corporal movements and mental causes of corporal movements” (22). In other words, via Dickens, it would be as if misery and the hauling by servants could be thought to move a person in sepa-rate but comparable senses. The philosophical mistake is to assume that because the body obeys certain strictly mechanical and self-contained laws, the mind, so as not to be reduced to an appendage of the mechani-cal body, must be understood as equally systematic and self-contained, entirely immaterial in its separate sphere, and thus, from outside itself, invisible to any understanding by other minds in any of its aspects, in-cluding desire and will.

Without returning to the Dickens example in this regard, Ryle quickly concedes that one can speak reasonably of mental “processes” just as “there occur physical processes” (22). That is not a false parallelism. The point is that these occurrences are not of the same order of event at all, not on the same plane of “existence,” and thus neither commensurable nor wholly separate and unavailable to each other. In sum, it is “just as good or bad a joke to say ‘there exist prime numbers and Wednesdays and public opinion and navies’ as to say ‘there exist both minds and bod-

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ies’” (24). Concerning bodily motion vis-à-vis cognition, there is neither pure disjunction nor pure conjunction between them. But access there is. Mind, we may say, following Ryle’s objection, is partly revealed when a physical process is understood not just as occurrence or event but as in-tentional (or involuntary) action, as behavior. For by their behavior others can be known. The unholy ghost of a disembodied Cartesian subjectivity, by contrast — and to posit it in yet another strained categorical lapse of expected grammar — is at once in hiding and doubt.

Syntactic Force Fields: Both Sways at Once

Here the Dickensian discrepancy that snaps apart the collocation “in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair” — forcing upon it, and it into, two grammatical loci at once — may be understood as not just a convenient send-up of weak metaphysics but rather as a fuller gloss on just the sort of corrective posed by Ryle. The phrasing offers a genuine mode of thought glimpsed within the leeway of everyday language. Replaying at broader grammatical spans the cross-word ripplings of poetic language more nar-rowly, in their blended lendings between syllables, the sylleptic fusion of terms marks not a nagging lack of logic but its revealing slack, not a weakness but a tweak. Burrowing beneath the rational laws of discourse, such wording churns with the foundational uncertainties of language it-self. So how far short of philosophy does such tropology fall when, by its very nature, its figuration not only pivots on dubious metaphysical distinctions but dances on the very grave of Aristotelian logic, perturb-ing its assumptions within a wry coherence of another sort? And where philosophy leads by way not just of literary but of linguistic irony, can a textual ethics be far behind?

Syllepsis is not just illogical, like erroneous philosophy. At least in the case of Miss Bolo, sylleptic e/motion is itself a post-Cartesian “interven-tion” — displaced by grammar alone, under syntactic momentum, from material symptom to immaterial cause. Ryle might, in this sense, have held on longer to his throwaway joke, hitched a further ride on that unat-tributed Dickensian “sedan-chair.” As with the double inclusion of Pick-wick in sleep and in the barrow, mind itself, for Ryle, can seem bodied forth — whether its vehicular agency is stationary or in flight. Generally speaking, the whole forced point of syllepsis is not to slip into but to re-fuse a strict dualism, blur its verbs, smudge its polarity. Similarly, in the metaphysical demolition that Ryle is out to perform, mind and body are no more self-enclosed as separable systems than are the different “ins”


of Dickens’s comic discrepancy across “in a flood of tears and a sedan- chair.” Bodily and mental “processes” relate to and interanimate each other. Dickens’s vehicular chair, one can not resist saying, becomes an anti-Cartesian case of the cart without the horse. For by implication from the lady’s getting swept away by carriers in her portable seat, we can, in context, already infer the inner consternation proved by her overflowing tears. To render the idea awkwardly logical, we would need to find her emotions welling up into bodily manifestation “in a flood of tears in a sedan-chair.” Looking at the actual full sentence from Dickens in Chapter 35 begins to make the irony clearer yet, clearer and more interesting. For “Miss Bolo rose from the table considerably agitated, and went straight home, in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair” (35: 482). It had been a di-sastrous evening at cards, Pickwick inept, the soirée ruined. Even before the syllepsis, there is a quiet divergence between the physical and the mental, as paraphrasing “rose from the table considerably agitated” as “rose aroused” would make a little more obvious. But even without such paronomastic inflection, etymology stresses the divide, beyond a com-mon root, between motion and emotion: agitare — move, related to the Latin for drive. The twisted gist of this: by that point in the miserable evening she was driven crazy and home, carried away by feeling and her porters both, transported not just by hand but by emotion. That sort of thing — not illogical only, in Ryle’s polemic sense, but strategically alogical, estranging, floating a mordant correlation across its metaphysi-cal discrepancy.

So let us return to the fuller context of that earlier Pickwickian joke as well, in Chapter 19, where the strain on the novelist’s own phrasing (in the context of his hero’s throttled eloquence) has its curious say. We may call it the narrative’s own faux naivety of syntax rather than its “category-mistake.” Naive, but — as so often — deflationary as well. The second shoe of syllepsis regularly falls with a thud, and not least when a physi-cal fall is involved. Punch-drunk on punch itself, Mr. Pickwick “began to forget” (the phrasing of progressive regression) “how to articulate any words at all; and finally, after rising to his legs to address the company in an eloquent speech” (paired to’s on a shaky and noncommon footing all their own), instead he allows his intended grandiloquence to fall literally flat. For it is just here, with narrative’s own grammar growing mimeti-cally disarticulated, that — rather than achieve the desired rhetorical el-evation — “he fell into the barrow, and fast asleep, simultaneously.”

Desire is met with and checked by its material prevention: first in the cognitive relapse from promised speech, then in a total mental as well as

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physical collapse. If actually reading such a syllepsis, rather than noting the mere fact of its logical disjunction, Ryle might have been quick to note how action bespeaks the intention to speak; and how the cause of its default is apparent as well, in the mode of behavior, to “other minds.” The mind made up can also be made out; will is materially manifest in the rising “to.” Besotted oblivion is likewise apparent in the physical tumble. There is no mind/body dualism to be flagged across this slide from posture to nugatory consciousness; the two cooperate perfectly in tuning out the audience and the world, the upended body answering to the suspended mind. Hardly occulted, the putative ghost in the machine, in this case throwing a monkey wrench into its own supposed apparatus, is instead a mentality fully manifest in action. Manifest, that is, as can-celled in temporary oblivion.

In the hero’s collapse, it is not just that one default is physical and one in a wholly different way mental: two incompatible trajectories of occur-rence converging, like diverted parallel lines, in a now literal, now figural descent. Combining them is not wrong in this way, it is just wrenched askew — and openly so, the “category-mistake” slamming them together to make discrepancy itself another kind of covert association. Dickens’s turn is a categorical slippage rather than a slip: a tactical vagrancy. It reminds us that there are not just processes physical over against pro-cesses mental, but that there is that third thing as well — the occurrence of verbal process — where, among other feats, the mental can indeed be made visible in the material: in the writing itself, as well as in its rep-resented plot. Prepositions can again, as with Derrida’s sense of hymen entre, inscribe the hitching — and hinging — point of a rotated predica-tion. Involving no misfiring of the grammatical synapses, the lag time is only that unspoken gap of recognition between the said and the otherwise done.

And what of Miss Bolo’s pre-posited mood, her materialized state of mind, there in that sedan chair and that gush of frustration, with the first “in” as “inside of” and the second “in” as . . . what, exactly? Our not be-ing able to say for sure is the real philosophical point, over which literary hermeneutics, however swift and intuitive at first pass, should be as dis-posed to linger as would analytic philosophy to bear down in some other case. Syllepsis, split repeatedly as it is between body and mind, material and emotional dis/positions, is frequently a post- and even anti-Cartesian wordplay. In context, syllepsis can be seen to displace and “alienate” an idiom that would otherwise work to naturalize exactly the profound oddness of inside/outside dualities. “In a flood of tears” is a strange if en-


tirely vernacular locative, for it equivocates the border between body and affect under the sign of the person, the character. The event of welled-up frustration begins in her, rather than her dismay being inherent in that liquid rush. There is an unseen mental torrent whose release of emotion those tears symptomatize — and, as narrative, signify. In such a frenzy, the turmoil is altogether inward. The point might have been made in this strained way instead: She was as full of distress as the carriage was of her.3 But of the former mood we say instead that she is in it: steeped in that distress, full to overflowing with it, and thus awash in her own in-ner vexation. As so often, Dickensian characterization, levitated across his oscillating syntax, exaggerates a human norm, reminding us in the process that the novel as genre becomes a prominent post-Cartesian labo-ratory. For it is there that action, narrative behavior, is yielded up as the primary access to other minds. Fifteen chapters apart, the toppled Pick-wick and the flummoxed Miss Bolo are what they do, their mentalities all but immanent to action.

But before pursuing the ethical satire that this syntactic “presentation” of the symptom so often incurs in narrative development, as brought to a head in Dickens’s last novel, we note that there is another way in which sylleptic language might serve to critique an entrenched mind/body dual-ism rather than just by replicating its strain in bare outline, as Ryle seems to think, exposing its kind of false logic. What this would require notic-ing has to do not with the content of a description but with the form of its inscription. As a syntax of two minds at once, such troping returns choice itself to the manifest level of phrasing rather than holding it to an already assimilated precondition of the speech act. Syllepsis thereby renders each governing predicate the alternative to itself, open still to the paradigm not of morphology (the bifold verb is already spelled out) but of denotation. One sense of predication virtualizes the other in a mutual exclusion: a true contra-diction arbitrated by its fence-sitting syntax. In philosophic terms more deep-going yet, syllepsis probes the very overlap of ontology and linguistics. Writers as different as the poet-critic Allen Grossman and the post-Heideggerean philosopher Giorgio Agamben converge on this point. Each, as we shall see, is attuned to literary language’s unique way of defying not just the ferocious either/or of Descartes, but even the foundation of all logic, the primal law of noncontradiction in Aristotle.

3 In Little Dorrit there is a similar chiastic rather than sylleptic irony: “Mr Merdle’s right hand was filled with the evening paper, and the evening paper was full of Mr. Merdle” (2, 12: 535).

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This is the rigorously “excluded middle” where no thing can be A and not-A at once. An alternative to this logic can begin to crystallize around the split faceting of syllepsis, which the evidence to come should help us recognize for what it is: not a caving-in of the either/or but a concretiza-tion of a more probing and even liberatory both/and.

In reading, the time it takes to sort out such a sylleptic split is the time of unfixity if not indecision, of openness, of leap, with consequences ethical as well as linguistic. These are consequences evident not just in the reading of character at the narratological level of plot (body in mo-tion as temporal agency) but in the character of reading itself — at what I have termed the narratographic stratum of response.4 With Dickens’s first novel, it is not simply that readers — in on the joke, primed by their own linguistic flexibility — are wised up more than the Pickwicks or Miss Bolos of the fictive world, who do not see the discrepancies narrat-ed of them. Rather than complacent ironies vested by omniscience, such quick-witted syntactic recognition submits to a deeper obstacle course in literary apprehension: an exercise in discerning the rifts and continuities between surface and depth, motion and emotion, body and mind, plot and character — and, even more fundamentally yet for the literary reader, between depiction and significance along the conveyor belt of syntax.

As we have seen in our Dickensian examples so far, there is a compart-mentalization of two senses of the trope’s governing predicate, bicameral in its (juris)diction. That is at the semantic level, where signifiers are set in motion. One level up, the significance of such disjunctive phrasing as literary sign becomes the division itself: the mutual exclusion as a covert thematic synergy. Marking the very split that its own formulation twists into view in order to bind up at a new level, syllepsis applies a linguistic splint that engrafts two branches onto the same grammatical trunk. Read-ing may in this way discern a strained join that a more stringent logic would seem to occlude. It is often a case not of apples-and-oranges, as we say, but of discordant produce from a common lexical root. Sorting through, and out, such disjunct verbal production is the frequently sa-tiric (and thus, at the simplest level, ethical) charge — and ignited chal-lenge — of syntactic time in these formulations, whose very moral may wait latent in their failed conflation of body/mind registers. From the midst of Pickwick’s would-be grandiloquence, a verbal pratfall levels his tipsy elation, mocking by physical abjection the ambitions of a now

4 Narratography is my term for a mode of stylistic attention keyed at times to the smallest linguistic units capable of taking a narrative charge (see Stewart 2009).


unconscious brain. Miss Bolo fares no better in the ferrying home of her syntax. Pointed up by the disjunction of material comforts and vain emo-tional discomfiture, there is the class irony of faceless hands lifting only her physical, not her emotional, burden across the rapid homeward line of servant labor as narrative transition.

In this way a subsuming pattern may well seem to emerge from satiric division, often a moral continuum of poetic justice, or at least an ethical arc across the behavioral cleft, as in the case of the colonialist patri-arch in Dombey and Son a decade after Pickwick Papers, his false front of confidence buttressed by laundresses in his stately domestic appear-ance. He is at one typical point a self-inflicted stick figure appearing in a grammatical fragment with no verb of being at all. Just: “Mr. Dombey stiff with starch and arrogance” (151–52), where a firmness of collar and formal shirt front are not just metonymies for his awkward stiffness but metaphors for the rigid shell of his pride.5 Half a decade later, and invit-ing an equal double-take in a rapid shuttle from a material to a spiritual sense, Dickens writes sarcastically in the fourth chapter of Bleak House (1851–1852) about a hypocritical colonial mission operating, as one dis-reputable character has it, “with a view to the general cultivation of the coffee berry — and the natives” (4: 82). The conjoining of missionary zeal to agrarian plunder has, in its emphatic italics, the blatant aroma of afterthought (abbreviated in repetition a few paragraphs later as “the cultivation of coffee, and natives”; 4: 89). In each place, Christian con-version and crop-raising butt heads in the same agri-cultural predication of the Cause. Categorical dysfunction, perhaps, in Ryle’s logical terms, yet in such geopolitical slippage begins the leverage of irony itself in the narrative of history. But my main goal is to show how there is a latent ethical energy in the sylleptic backfire aside from any local morality or politics inflected by its carefully aimed discrepancies. Beyond adverse judgments about self-blinkered hypocrisies on the part of given char-acters, for instance, obverse recognitions on the reader’s part do not so much inculcate any particular set of values as install a program of open-ness: alertness per se before the critique it facilitates.

5 The structuring as well as texturing function of sylleptic ironies across Dickens’s Dombey and Son, in comparison with a different but related use of the device in E. M. For-ster’s Howards End, is the subject of my article “The Foreign Offices of British Fiction” (see Stewart 2007).

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To Be and Not to Be: Twice Upon a Time

In the narratographic register, syllepsis is a function of plot at its narrow-est, a marker of syntactic time per se. According to the philosophy of mind, a syllepsis like “in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair” exposes the same “broken-backed” (Ryle 20) logic that Ryle finds plaguing dualism. Like mental vis-à-vis material “occurrences,” the compound predication of such a grammar introduces no true symmetry. Philosophically, then, a glitch. Linguistically, a double hitch. Narratographically, a strictly verbal “occurrence” whose cognitive recoil is activated as a temporal micro-loop. Or say that syllepsis is a time-release but recursive grammar from which syntax itself emerges — in its requisite temporality — as the nar-rative function degree zero, where the arcs of plot are modeled by the inching forward of grammatical ligatures over the elapsing space of the same again but different.

For Einstein, time is best understood as what keeps everything from happening all at once. Syntax is what keeps meaning from happening all at once. In literary syntax, however, there are more meanings unleashed than those readily subordinated to a coherent narrative grammar of the adverbial “once upon a time.” The minuscule time-loop involved with syl-lepsis approaches what we might characterize as the paradoxical disman-tling of succession by overlap. Approaches this condition, yes, but never quite negotiates the collapse it teases us with. The overlap is uneven. The still functional difference between the two-ply laminate and the progres-sive aggregate, between coincidence and syncopation, is a difference that remains in play, enforced by being foregrounded. A pun stops one cold, translating itself into another valence. Its effects being always on the run instead, the licensed bifurcation of syllepsis keeps up the momentum and one’s linguistic guard at once, alert for both the inertial forward drive and the inert or unworkable parallel. At such times, reading, more obviously than elsewhere, makes the sentence “come together” only in the dizzy head — in some elusive tertium quid between incongruities, a phantom Gestalt. One might think of it this way: in the forward topple (rather than pure toggle) between alternate predicating sequences, syllepsis fashions from its perspectival discrepancy a common but unphrased vanishing point. The often minimal and fleeting time-loop of sylleptic effect is in turn a feedback loop, adjusting the categories required to decipher it: hence a figure and a metatrope at once.

I began by calling syllepsis an effect instead of a trope, though, be-cause it is no typical figure of speech. It does not wholly “turn aside” (as


the root sense of “troping” would have it) from the literal to the figurative, nor from whole to part, as in the tropes of metaphor or synecdoche. Rath-er, it turns aside from itself in progress, and leaves visible the trace of its veer. Synecdoche inscribes an invisible equals sign: my wheels = my car. Syllepsis makes visible a non equivalence. Racing through unexpected traffic to an academic interview, the thought might occur: “I am using up my gas and my patience by the minute.” What sense of containment and drain link these two diminishments? What further idiomatic trope, with its conjuring of time as a river, duration as flow, would be added to this mix, this mismatch, by groaning, “My gas, patience, and time are all running out together”? What principle of togetherness really holds those valences of the predicate in line? And what lateral drift between meta-phor and metonymy is exposed by such abutments in progress? These are linguistic and rhetorical questions so far, if distantly philosophical. What makes them literary, in particular novelistic, and in turn narratographic, even at times ethical, is their local provocation within the given novel whose timing they impede.

Dragged kicking with both feet at once from Augustan texts into Vic-torian fiction, syllepsis is deployed by Dickens so as, in its skewed syn-tax, to skewer the tension between surface and intent in his characters, whether enforced by spiritual pretension or collapsed into its somatic or material exposure. Syllepsis has a varied career after Dickens as well. Very much under the influence of the “Inimitable,” George Eliot tries it on as lighthearted class satire for a passing barb in Daniel Deronda (1876) about the Reverend Gascoigne, who, in two senses of his predi-cated anointment, “had once been Captain Gaskin, having taken orders and a diphthong but shortly before” his engagement (Bk. 1, ch. 3). The telltale “kin” of his second syllable disowns its Anglo-Saxon kinship by taking on not just an oi but a silent g and e as well: as complete a Gallic conversion at the level of the rarefied material signifiers as any spiritual conversion one can imagine him undergoing en route to clergyhood. Here as elsewhere, easily (if not instantly), one gets the split gist. Cognizance must swerve quickly to avoid confusion. Like so many effects of prose in motion, syllepsis works best when it works fast syntactically and out semantically.

The least comic of Victorian novelists, Thomas Hardy, varies the logic and the syntax of the trope for a chilling concision near the end of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891). After unrelenting setbacks and despera-tion, Tess finally, after murdering Alec, consummates her passion for her longtime husband Angel, and he, after his fashion, for her. Trespassers

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on happiness and its chamber alike, they are alone in a vacated mansion, hiding from the law in the illicit bed of their long-licensed and belated lovemaking. It is there that their trespass is encroached upon by the un-suspecting — and unsuspected — housekeeper in her quiet approach to the bedroom door. The lovers do not hear her coming, even in their post-coital hush. For linked by a quiet triple assonance on the short i sound, the caretaker’s “slippers and her antiquity had rendered her progress a noiseless one so far” (58: 577). Usually, in syllepsis, two nouns are ar-rayed together in the accusative case, though differentially positioned there by the verb — stationed for the more comic cadence of a delayed punch line; or else a pair of splayed adverbial phrases negotiated by a two-faced preposition (the only use of prepositional ambiguity singled out by Empson).6

Tess inverts this disorientation, producing and conjuring up an ominous misrecognition. Whereas Dickens delays his satiric effect until “into the barrow and fast asleep” are serially revealed as adverbial complements, Hardy puts the anomalous bonding up front. Instability precedes its own object, even though the trope usually works the other way around: “Shuf-fling and muffled, her approach was made silent by her slippers and her antiquity” would be the familiar format. But Hardy’s abuse of smooth-ness has its own point; there is a narratographic charge to his syntactic aggravation. Instead of a typical sylleptic game with delayed compre-hension, there is in Tess — at exactly this portentous, stolen moment of doomed domestic shelter — a further uneasiness of phrase, suggesting an almost queasy sense of overdetermined causality (footwear and infirmi-ty, accident and inevitability, the incidental and the inexorable) bearing down — in even the most trivial manner — on the couple’s elopement from the law. Fate, like grammar, conspires and converges.

In the broadest understanding of the sylleptic trope, the unstable par-allel can retain its grammatical format even as it swerves toward the force of antithesis. Henry James offers such a coupling — more dichotomy than oblique parity — in the unintentionally comic voice of his fuss-budget governess, who, early in The Turn of the Screw (1898), sees the

6 In Seven Types of Ambiguity William Empson glosses Shakespeare’s phrasing for a fire espied “by night and negligence,” unpacking an associational and contextual logic in the phrase that keeps it from being an overt play on two different senses of “by.” Without using the term syllepsis, he adds: “I know of no case where Shakespeare has made a flat pun out of a preposition, one meaning to each noun; I believe that (if done at all seriously) to be a unique property of the Augustans” (93). Much hangs on that “seriously” when looking past Pope to Edgeworth, Dickens, and beyond.


prepubescent Flora standing before her “in so much of her candour and so little of her nightgown” (ch. 10). The conceptual parting of company is syntactic only, certainly not of mind from body, since innocence can be read off from Flora’s ingenuous dishabille. Yet the specter of an eroticized girlhood, in the governess’s later paranoia of ghostly pollution, appears seeded in this very image of naïve rather than prurient undress. Gram-matically, though, the paradigm of syllepsis has gone soft in fastidious parallelism, dropping gently enough from the abstract into the concrete. To imagine it otherwise is to cast it up as a grammar truer to Augustan (and hence to a derivative Victorian) form: The state of her nightdress revealed her guilelessness and her flesh at once. In Ryle’s terms, there is obviously no cloaking of mind by body in this dislodged and alogical syntax.

Mutual Locutions

By Victorian form in this case, one means a single author preeminently. Dickens is widely thought to have stumbled into popular solecism with the adjective of the title to his last finished novel, meaning by it, more accurately, “our common friend.” Or he may have had something less settled in mind, given the confusing identity transfers and knotted lines of affiliation in the novel. If so, the extra rhetorical torque of the title would not be out of step with a pervasive dualism of perspective in the style of Our Mutual Friend — in its style as well as in its conceptual structures. Certainly the bifurcated grammar of syllepsis involves both a common and a mutual field of lexical force: two words interdependent in their derivation from an elusive common base, two words linked to each other by reciprocal alignment and mutual interference at once. In literary syllepsis, indeed, one fork of the grammar is often the metaphoric double of the other, its figurative counter in the realm of spirit rather than matter, the impalpable rather than the somatic. Even when sylleptic form loosens toward a more familiar parallelism, there are two pertinent sides to every syntactic coinage, mutually in(ter)determinate. Though the polyvalence of such syntax can sometimes grow thin from over-inflation, syllepsis in Our Mutual Friend can take credit at least for laying the ever shifting ground of its own strained coherence — and this in the marked psycho-logical fissure of subjectivity itself and its othering, even from within.

In this plot of multiple, split, redoubled, and siphoned-off identity, a typifying version of subjectivity severed by syntax occurs when the meek, retreating Twemlow tries summing himself up with a compara-

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tive evaluation. In so doing, he invokes a pivotal adjective of the novel (“poor”) along with a much-contested humanist noun (“man”) — in their paired shunt between financial and moral designation — to deliver a self-effacing double blow: “I am even a poorer man of business than I am a man” (3, 13: 632). Where a logic of cause and effect might seem to arc between the two appearances of “poor” as both ineffectual and (hence) impecunious, Twemlow’s modest annuity suggests instead that he means an ethical judgment on his virility and his mercantile acumen alike. Even the hero of the novel, John Harmon, could only say, in his own right, that he is a good deal more a man of business than he is a man.7

Elsewhere, the prying loose of sylleptic links into ironic dialogue can find itself thematized around an almost schizophrenic division of person-ality, where the most self-riven of characters, the schoolteacher Bradley Headsone, has his words turned back against him by the lawyer Wray-burn.8 About his pupil Charlie, Headstone ponderously insists: “I am his friend, and you shall find me so” — you will, that is, discover me as such. In instant response to this, Wrayburn goads the idiom into literalization in a request for Headstone to vacate the office: “And you will find him on the stairs” (2, 6: 346). This arch doubling seems almost to inspire a compact sentimental syllepsis on Headstone’s part, an imputed continu-ity of body and mind: “My hand and heart . . . are open to him.” And to this double understanding of openness, of handclasp and empathy, ges-

7 Harmon, having assumed an alias after being presumed dead, is said to have nothing to do, after renting rooms, but appoint the time for “the arrival of his furniture and himself, and go” (1, 4: 83). To say in the next sentence that he “did that as awkwardly as it might be done” is only to spell out what grammar has already enacted, leveling in the process the hero’s por-table goods and his person to mere items in transit. Even this early in the novel, self-division seems to breed expressive division, a kind of linguistic infection that is actually taken up by chiming dialogue. Bella insists by haughty inversion that “between Mr. Rokesmith and [her] there is a natural antipathy” (1, 4: 84), to which her feckless and usually quite unrhetorical father, his landlord Mr. Wilfer, can only rejoin that “between Mr. Rokesmith and [him], there is a matter of eight sovereigns” (1, 4: 84). An ongoing rhetorical model is quietly established in this shift from emotion to business.

8 Wrayburn shows himself an adept at such idiomatic byplay in the literalization of legal jargon: he can turn any turn of phrase against its source, even when raised by his friend Lightwood. Attempting in Chapter 12 to draw Eugene out concerning a marriage prospect his father has been scheming with the nudge of “[t]ouching the lady,” Lightwood’s mock formality is met with the sarcastic punning of “my intentions are opposed to touching the lady” (1, 12: 194).


ture and spirit, Eugene appends a sarcastic third sense: “And — quite a coincidence — the door is open” (2, 6: 346).9

The snide coinciding is that of syntax alone. In the more familiar, less aggressive cadences of the narrative voice, we hear how one of the students at Headstone’s school, the discreet Mary Ann, in keeping with the univocal “taking” of her usual backseat in life, “resume[s] her seat and her silence” (2, 11: 395). Here is the classic shift from material to im-material signified that we also find later in Lizzie Hexam’s being “[f]irm of look and firm of purpose” (4, 6: 768) when retrieving a man who was never either, the sarcastic, shape-changing, and now mutilated Wrayburn, from the river. No comedy in this, so the preposition seems repeated for an ennobling parallelism rather than a farcical jostle. These eruptions of sylleptic pattern can be more interesting — or less — but they never seem to have the precision and satiric snap of earlier novels like Dombey and Son.10 The blurring of metonymy and causality in a phrase linking steadiness of gaze with steadfastness of intent — so that all virtue is, as it were, worn on the sleeve of action — conveys the heroic synthesis of effort and affect in Lizzie’s rescue of Wrayburn.

The negative inversion of this moral coherence is just as effective, however, and far more frequent across Dickens’s corpus. By the time of Our Mutual Friend, the mutual demotion of material and spiritual regis-ters is at its familiar best when its coupling is also a dragging down, the discrepant grammatical linkage a kind of rhetorical ball and chain. The neoclassic prototype again: honor stained, or at least downgraded, by mere association with the materiality of brocade. In Dickens even super-annuated sexiness (rather than tainted virginal purity, as in Pope) can be taken down a peg by rank equivalence with its material appurtenances. Given her wilted eroticism, Lady Tippins seems almost rhetorically for-

9 Rightly seeing in this wordplay a linguistic symptom of all the moral evasiveness be-hind it, Headstone is reduced to the bluntness of traditional parallelism: “I scorn your shifty evasions, and I scorn you” (2, 6: 346). Turnabout, however lackluster, is indeed fair rhetorical play in this novel. And so Headstone, having flattened out Wrayburn’s galling wit in this em-phatic way, will be answered in kind by his later nemesis, Riderhood, who warns him against confessing his bludgeoning revenge against Wrayburn: “I’ll give up every word of it” (4, 7: 779), he snarls, meaning, “I’ll give up it, and I’ll give up you!”

10 Sometimes the parallelism has the beat of sylleptic division without the actual break from simple idiomatic parallelism, as in the phrase “more frequently giving him the cold shoulder than the warm hand” (2, 12: 405). But when the inebriated, flushed Wegg garbles a drinking ballad in a “flow of quotation and hospitality” (3, 6: 539), syllepsis helps stress that the latter flow is likewise degraded to rum and water.

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tified by the internal alliteration of “fan” with the tripled self-splayed assonance of “advantage” — and this despite the lingering aftertaste of the suffix “age” itself — when she is found “showing her entertaining powers and green fan to immense advantage” (2, 3: 300). Satire like this is certainly the trope’s native home. In a florid run-up to the misbegot-ten and loveless marriage of the Lammles in this novel, lyric abstrac-tion plummets to architectural specificity, metaphoric bestowal to literal tossing, when, in fine prepositional fettle, “the spring-van” is discovered “strewing flowers on the rosy hours and on the staircase” (1, 10: 163). Commemorating this same ominous occasion, the physical vies with the emotional — or in this case animal appetite with its rarefaction in the cer-emonial — when Twemlow, planning to review his cues for this wedding ritual while he dines, goes home “to take a plate of mutton broth with a chop in it, and a look at the marriage service” (1, 10: 164). And no doubt counsel sometimes — and sometimes tea.

Beyond such featherlight satiric fillips, an explicit socioeconomic iro-ny saws straight down the middle of a climactic piece of dialogue in this novel. Couched in the masquerading pique of Boffin’s miserly persona are the figurative and literal senses of “place,” both upper-middle-class quarters and the status with which they are metonymically associated: “How dare you come out of your station, and your place in my house” (3, 15: 635), he fulminates to Rokesmith. Rather than dividing to conquer in a lexical double blast, Boffin’s utterance seems to be all but stumbling over itself in shoring up its class prejudice.11 There is often a kind of dra-matic rightness in such limp rhetorical moments — even when the pallid phrase-making bleeds over into the narrative voice itself. Where else but in this late novel would a character like Mr. Twemlow — recovering from a headache induced by a continual circuit of dressy obligations — be found so wordily “getting better, and also getting himself into his

11 It is usually the narrator who wields either the purer sylleptic forms or their diluted variants, often with the governing verb repeated for a kind of unmistakable (if leaden) clar-ity. “Bella remaining invisible and silent, her father remained at his dessert and wine” (4, 4: 737). The effect can be heavily oversold: in another public house “Young Blight was gone, the coffee house waiter was gone, the plates and dishes were gone, the wine was going — but not in the same direction” (1, 12: 191–92). So baroque, if not decadent, has this lexical hair-splitting become that “not in the same direction” seems a reflexive comment on the vectors of predication as well as on the ingested rather than removed wine. Still in the same bibulous vein, at Miss Potterson’s bar the inherent bidirectionality of syllepsis is more crisply cap-tured in the somatic versus cognitive closed circuit of “an unctuous broad man of few words and many mouthfuls” (4, 12: 835).


obsolete little silk stockings” (3, 17: 689)? This has more of afterthought than of inspiration about it, as flagged by the heavy participial repetition, but the ironic point does not fall short of the target. Once again, the syl-leptic effect is pitched in suspension between the mental and the material in defining the narrow compass of Twemlow’s socialite rounds.

The real weakness of such grammatically overcoded sylleptic formu-lations in Our Mutual Friend appears when they turn from social satire to social amelioration. In the process, prose takes up some of the most idiomatic and routinized forms of middle-class speech, the bromides of capitalist domesticity, for the least estranging of applications. Flat-test and most complacent of all is when Bella as the new Mrs. Harmon, identified as such by the belated resurrection of her husband as the true Harmon heir, is ushered by the no-longer miser-ventiloquizing Boffin into what he himself might formerly have called her domestic “place” and her long-coveted social “station” — with the supposedly resonant “Welcome to your house and home” (4, 12: 839). Here is a stale cliché of differential connotation that must soon be redynamized by the barest of further sylleptic charges when we are told, a chapter later, of “Mr and Mrs John Harmon . . . taking possession of their rightful name and their London house” (4, 14: 849). Spiritual and material meet under a strictly legalistic aegis in this middle-class fantasy come true. With one sense of possession nominal only, the other spatial, the couple enters upon their renovated legitimacy by simultaneous access to their refurbished man-sion. The violence to linguistic expectation upon which syllepsis can sometimes capitalize is padded beyond retrieval.

Yet toward the end of the novel the irreverence of the narrative voice is reasserted, and the force of syllepsis is more rectifying in that comic vein than in a sentimental and domestic one. Betake yourself, in this mood, to the long fallow law practice of Mortimer Lightwood, who “found him-self staring at real clients instead of out of window” (4, 16: 875) in such a way that the first sense of the verb has a stronger focal point than the second. Even the dropped article in “out of window” seems couched to evoke a former paucity. In Our Mutual Friend, the sylleptic penchant is more effective yet when the rectifications are punitive. The narrator might almost have said — in an earlier, more Pickwickian vein — that the blackmailer Wegg is shown the door and the dung cart. It is actu-ally better than that. Collaring the culprit, the suddenly intrepid Sloppy, ordered “to deposit his burden in the road,” disburdens himself of the villain among the road’s gathered deposits in the “scavenger’s cart.” His act of “shooting Mr. Silas Wegg into the cart’s contents” opens the gap

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of syllepsis between adverbial agency and an adverbialized object, for it is said to have been “achieved with great dexterity, and with a prodigious splash” (4, 14: 862).12 In another prepositional pivot, the “with” of cause lands as effect, where even the monosyllabic repetition takes on a further aroma of assonance, bonding “with” to “prodigious.” Including that fur-ther splat of sticky syllabification (“-gious splash”), Dickens’s prose here sinks smartly to the occasion: it recycles a wasteland of material evacua-tion into comic retribution.

In the last chapter, syllepsis gets brusquely even with the cumbersome Podsnap for his bloated class consciousness in disapproving the marriage of Wrayburn to the lowly factory girl. An elevated sense of spiritual rank is travestied by physical stature when Podsnap’s “indignation” is found pompously “rising high” into his hairline (4, 17: 889). This glosses a syl-lepsis just before, where we are reminded that Podsnap is a man of no inner life but that which swells to the surface of his girth — and its pent-up irascible bottleneck. For we have just seen him “with his temper and his shirt-collar about equally rumpled” (4, 17: 889), recalling Dombey and Son’s “stiff with starch and arrogance” (8: 151–52). Even while the analytic force of syllepsis ebbs in some places, it resurges to attack the mind/body dichotomies over and over again.13 Physiological and sarto-rial composure — as with Twemlow getting better and his stockings on — are antinomies only in a world which has not forgotten the difference. Moreover, with Podsnap’s ruffled bluffness, one does not have to hear some further lurking pun on “shirt-collar” and “choleric” to see the un-spoken convergence of attributional fields in his swollen ire. In the syn-thetic value system of the Dombeys and the Podsnaps of this Victorian world, the buttoned-up and the defensive, the starched and the stiff, mark the tacit idiomatic reduction of the patriarch to the stuffed shirt.

12 I am grateful to Joshua Gooch for adding this pungent example to a list of such effects I handed out in a graduate seminar one day. The emphatically repeated “with” is all that dislodges it from the classic Empsonian prototype of a prepositional double grammar in the Augustan mode.

13 In The Origins of the English Novel Michael McKeon points to the genre dialectic be-tween form (epistemologically charged) and content (value-bearing); in the case of syllepsis, as a stylistic register of this dialectics, the surface of empirical details is pitted against their disclosed ethical weight.


Leaving the World and a Will

Syllepsis stands watch, straddling watch, over a habit of perception that has become systemic by the time of Our Mutual Friend, and this as a rather direct function of its satiric animus. Even the slackness of its link-ages can seem to reflect the fate of a particularly insidious doubleness — especially between materiality and value — grown so pervasive that even its sardonic notice does not always sharpen the wit. In Our Mutual Friend, sylleptic form is a piecemeal refraction not only of a collapsed metaphysical duality, Cartesian or otherwise, but of the erasure of dis-tinctions between material form and mental life. Its shaky syntactic yok-ings mark an imploded cultural dialectic between outer and inner, object and subject, fortune and worth, class and person. As arrivistes whose purchased surfaces allegorize the superficial, the “Veneerings” give the problem its clearest name. In the materialism of the spirit to which urban life has shriveled, physical and psychic notations operate on a new bland par, emptying out each other’s energies. The field of wordplay is the lev-eled playing field of bourgeois vanity itself. Even at the frayed edges (or split ends) of plot, narratography is activated when a momentum gener-ated by the story is momentarily blocked or splayed by these resistant pockets of obviated difference.

In ways familiar to any Dickens reader, but multiplied with abandon in Our Mutual Friend, outer and inner seem almost to mock each other in the same grammatical breath. Clothes make a statement and the man. Bracing collars and moral indignation exist on the same discursive plane. Show has become all that remains of substance, surface of depth, body of self. A man’s stockings are as important to get on as is his life to get on with. The power of one’s emotions and the spread of one’s diversion-ary fan are shown to equal advantage. The sylleptic cast of conscious-ness in Our Mutual Friend is ultimately no laughing matter. It does not resolve incommensurabilities by its wry disjunctions, or even raise the possibility of doing so. It exposes, instead, a bland or sometimes brutal dehumanization of the unseen by the seen. Against this secular abjection, the approached moment of death makes its corrective contribution — as in every Dickens novel. Here its punctual recurrence recruits sylleptic overtones in the skewed Victorian binaries of body and soul, time and eternity.

When the penniless old Betty Higden takes flight from the ministra-tions of social bureaucracy, the slight dissonance between the material and the abstract, the somatic and the socioeconomic, resonates explicitly

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with one of the book’s sustaining topical satires: Dickens’s critique of the depersonalizing Poor Laws. Indigent and now itinerant, Betty is seen “trudging through the streets, away from paralysis and pauperism” (2, 14: 449) — the latter an institutional euphemism and to her mind a curse. Bifurcated across that alliterative linkage is not simply a crippling im-poverishment versus a pauperized debility. Instead, a tacit chain of cause and effect is suggested: slowing down in her tracks would leave her vul-nerable to apprehension by the state — so that motion is both antithetical to stasis and an antidote to that other sort of “arrest” and humiliation. Even her actual death in Lizzie Hexam’s arms is later figured as a further flight from stasis, this time across the mortal divide. The rhythmic pulse of Dickens’s prose marks this transit by the comma-paused conjunction: “Lizzie Hexam very softly raised the weather-stained grey head, and lift-ed her as high as Heaven” (3, 8: 577). In this spiritual quantum leap, kept from unequivocal theology by meliorative analogy itself (every bit “as high as,” rather than literally “up to”), one senses the underlay of another post-Cartesian syllepsis across the shift in burden from anatomical noun to pronoun of subjecthood, body to alleviated mind, as if Dickens were to have said: Lizzie’s gesture elevated the head and her at once, lifting the weight of the world forever.

So, too, does such a sylleptic model shadow the earlier death of Betty’s charge, the orphan Johnny, without whom she has far less than ever to live for. Even more obviously there, syntactic divergence turns on an epistemological slippage within cognition. When the feverish boy awakes for the last time “out of a sleep or a swoon or whatever it was” (2, 9: 383), he is said to “[come] to himself . . . to find himself lying in a little quiet bed.” The faintly metaphoric (though wholly displaced) idiom “came to himself” (for the return of consciousness as a return to) meets its materialist counterpart in the physical immanence of the self-recognized wasting body, where an actual struggle toward perception lurks beneath the idiomatic metaphor of predication in “to find himself.” In this slight sylleptic forking between cognizance and self-recognition, between awareness in-itself and for-itself (as nineteenth-century dialec-tics might have it in this Hegelian vein), the mind/body drama is once more staged in its naturalized vernacular. I think again, therefore I know myself here. Yet no sooner do I find my separate self this one last time than I lose it a few sentences later, once and for all. The chapter closes together with Johnny’s life — that is, ends on his death scene — and does so in the double valence of “leaving” as bequest and exit. In a twofold bestowal, he has just given away his toys and a kiss (to Bella by proxy).


And so, after these strictly verbal dispositions of his last wishes: “Having now bequeathed all he had to dispose of, and arranged his affairs in this world, Johnny, thus speaking, left it.” Johnny leaves not only all he had to bestow but also the world — to those (an added undertone in truncation) who still care for its inheritances and rewards.

Even when not explicitly troped across a split grammar, the sylleptic divide is so deep a structuring armature in Dickens — in the balancing act between material and spiritual registers — that it can make its nar-ratographic mark on reception even at the most subliminal level. As the very motor of his style in the pursuit of ironic surprise, syllepsis for Dick-ens is in more ways than one a matter of life and death. It is also a matter of a discrepancy at once psychological and ideological. To recall Ryle’s point, the verbal comedy of such category-mistakes would be “just as ridiculous” in the form of disjunction as it is in the mode of yoked corre-lation. In some cases, more so. Imagine Twemlow deciding to take either a chop or a look. Or, closer to the characterological nub of Dickensian narration, try conceiving of the blowhard Podsnap rumpled either in temper or in shirt collar, rather than both. Or the patriarch Dombey stiff either of dress or of address. Not to mention Pickwick dropping either off to sleep or down into the barrow. Dickensian syllepsis, in cases like these last three especially, does not just mock the dichotomous axioms of metaphysical dualism by exacerbating the mismatch of psychological and material features on which its binary rests. More than this, Dickens’s exploitation of the trope carries to parodic extremes our willingness to acknowledge the partial inherence of the one in the other, mind in matter, spirit in body, intent in somatic event — to speak all but sylleptically, to recognize consciousness in outer manifestation and in process.

The ethical calisthenics of such phrasing need not be overstated in order to be generally granted. The working out of the trope is often low-impact fun. But that is only the start, on the surface of its verbal advance. Among other syntactic formats of course, but uniquely temporal in its dovetailing of grammatical with semantic increments, syllepsis can seem to operate as the proving ground of twofold recognitions more broadly. In direct speech, the grammatical (sar)chasm can, of course, be facile or sneering, yet outside the context of the characters’ dialogues it offers test runs of the interpretive double-take. By requiring us to get the gram-matical oddness in order to get on with the plot, the shock of common denomination forces differences to be apprehended in their sameness, if only on the run — differences as great as that between existence and extinction or between consciousness and its material locus, the mind no

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sooner lodged as ghost in the body’s haunted house than materialized by that body in action.

We have dwelt on Ryle’s unattributed use of novelistic syllepsis — not to show what he missed saying about its literary wit, let alone about its narrative charge, nor even for what he seems to have missed it saying about the crux of his attack on the bad logic per se that fosters Cartesian dualism. The Dickensian example he advanced claimed further attention because of the trope’s own approach to the body/mind split — as, for instance, between Pickwick’s collapsed bulk and his lapsed conscious-ness, between the starchiness of Podsnap’s garments and of his mental-ity, between harvested crops and souls. The approach is through false parallelism as clue to a deeper rapprochement, one brokered by ironies that repeatedly level the difference between bodily act and mental activ-ity, projecting the violated Cartesian duality as an elusive reciprocity of terms.

Explicit about the Aristotelian “excluded middle” (derived from an either/or logic) that poetry must lay claim to and make expansive (as instead an in-between), poet-critic Allen Grossman titles his latest col-lected meditations on literature by the hyphenated True-Love (2009). He explains this as an attempt to suggest the force of conjuncture between epistemology and desire in the poetic act (or the labors of the critic-poet for that matter), where there are more things to be known than are dreamt of by the categorical exclusions of an either/or philosophy. In the dedi-catory lines of his book, Grossman offers his thoughts to “the kindred spirit,” unnamed, with whom his “first encounter” was in Chicago. But the speaker is now “far from Chicago — that / great city — and many years nearer death.” Note the muted syllepsis: not as close to Chicago as to death. Space and time edge toward collapse around the overdetermina-tions of the far/near dichotomy, further pressured by the alternative and still latent symmetry by which death meets the poetic voice on its own chiastic terms. Far am I from Chicago now . . . and death, since then, many years nearer. In the conjunctive mapping of truth-desire by the ide-ality of verse, even while dodging the cliché of “life’s journey,” poetry’s mode of knowing would in this case love, as it were, to think of time in terms of telescoped space.

If Grossman champions the expansive both/and against a rigid Ar-istotelian logic, he does so under the recognized shadow of that bitter Orphic regime where a desire to know the image loses the thing. The metalinguistic overtones of this: where the name of love is, there love is not. This is precisely the logical stranglehold that poetry seeks to over-


come. Just here, the intervention of philosopher Giorgio Agamben is par-ticularly suggestive, since for him linguistics and philosophy together founder on a logic of the signifier versus the signified.14 The impasse of non-contradiction, from Aristotle through Hegel, extends to reference itself, as Agamben also reminds us: it is not possible for a thing to be and to be named in the same place. Where the word is, the thing is not. Where being (the ontological abstraction) is, entities are not.15 Such is the Hegelian negativity erected on Aristotelian first principles. And this is why Agamben needs a more sweeping end-run around Aristotle than does a literary critic like Grossman, not just dismantling the rigidities of his classical logic but finding within them, in the dialectics of potential, a liberation of the as if and the both/and from the either/or. Against the negative emerges the virtual.

According to the rule of the excluded middle, either a thing is possible or it is not. It can not be both. But Agamben starts over again. He reminds us that if a thing is actual, strictly speaking it is no longer possible. Po-tential disappears in realization, even as every realization harbors its own potential alternative in nonbeing. Aristotle would say a thing cannot be identical with its other, cannot be itself and its alternative at once. But if the alternative is by definition absent from the thing as its mere potential, it is by the same token present to it in the mode of the possible, the virtu-al. In light of this philosophical principle, we may say that normal syntax actualizes potential in event, while syllepsis stages the present potential of alternative meanings across its internal cleft; it is there that a predica-tion that is otherwise only latent emerges by divergence from itself.

Sensing alternative signals on the phrased underside of the existent, in the unlocalizable zone of present possibility, is the utopic gesture of philosophy, politics, ethics, and art. Geoffrey Galt Harpham, champion-ing a “principled confusion” not unlike Grossman’s plea for a poetry that does not shrink from contradiction, sounds much like Agamben on the dialectic of potential, when writing that “the ethical is is an is that ought to be; the ethical ought is an ought that is.” In other words, a present im-perative, a present image: a true-love nexus of the desired and the known, or, in Harpham’s terms rather than Grossman’s, a palpable convertibility

14 This is the point of departure for Agamben’s essay “Philosophy and Linguistics” in Po-tentialities, which I discuss at length in connection with the linguistic substrate of Romantic and post-Romantic style in “Phonemanography” (2008).

15 See Agamben 1991, as well as a more recent treatment of similar issues, via Heidegger and Blanchot rather than Hegel and Agamben, in Schwenger 2001.

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of description and prescription, “facts and values” (23). Including the value of imagining certain facts otherwise: making the given give up its alternative (rather than giving up on it).

In its slippage and interchange, the trope of syllepsis restages this convertibility at so narrow a compass that it can seem like a short circuit, where the immanent alternative nips at the heels of present intent across a skid of predication. Yet in the double-taking it takes time for, syllepsis can leverage paradox for a further dialectic. On his own terms, Agamben can show that it must be possible for a thing to be, to be here and now, other than it is, can show that otherness is potential itself realized as such, immanent to present form: a lingering contingency not yet effaced by ap-parent determinations. At a certain microlevel where philosophy meets poetics, syllepsis becomes, then, the literary staging — by grammatical delay and overlap — of immanent contingency. As the trope of reciprocal redefinition, it keeps alive the accidents of word choice in the predicates of being or event, each phase of the locution mutually revising the other across the adjusted registers of syntactic time, full to the brim with their own alternatives.

This is how syllepsis flexes syntax as an exercise in what we might call alterity recognition. The predicate is pre-dictated, but only in ret-rospect. Oh, I see now, “went home in” had to have meant that, too: an open secret of diction hidden in plain if refracted sight — the narrative flux not reserved for the phrased pace of event but internal to the event of phrasing itself. Syllepsis, then, as anatomized so far: as logic, a category disorder; as syntax, a definitional shuttle, with its sudden decoupling and recovery; as meaning, a double-timing of the sentence; as significance, a node of language not just randomly multiplied but raised, in present potential, to the power of itself.

Agamben elsewhere celebrates “the caesura and the enjambment,” stressing Valéry’s “beautiful” definition of poetry as “a prolonged hesita-tion between sound and meaning” (331).16 As a lexical hesitation about syntactic deployment, syllepsis could be thought of as the prose equiva-lent of “the caesura and the enjambment” at once, the cut-and-run from

16 Agamben’s sense, after Valéry, of sound postponing sense (2008: 331) recalls Hart-man’s definition of a “pun” either as “two meanings competing for the same phonemic space” or as “one sound bringing forth semantic twins” (347n19). The inevitable deferral of one meaning by the other is only the clearer in the distributed, skewed fusions of syllepsis. Agamben’s emphasis on enjambment as the quintessential poetic disjuncture between meter and meaning, sound and sense, is developed more fully in The End of the Poem (1999a: 34, 100).


within a shared duplex grammar. In the sounding of one word, what specifically grammatical resonance is meant, what echoes return as the present possibility of the same on the alternate face of its difference? To what extent, for instance, is the lapsed metaphoric sense of an idiomatic verb (in “fall asleep”) there potentially, by internal recursion, or say by enjambed but suspended application — by run-on, spill-over, and sudden correction — in a paradoxically simultaneous sounding of its physical rather than mental denotation (“into the barrow”)?

Writing one thing but (while) meaning not just it but also its alterna-tive: such is a discursive work that spaces out the lexicon less as cleanly forked duality than as the isolated act of phrasing in process — over-riding discrepancies, underwriting plurality. In the barely grammatical overlay of two meanings as enjambed significance, what comes through after all, then, is the displayed (though always undesignated) mechanics of designation itself, its pitfalls and splits as well as gentler hesitations.17 Twemlow taking not just a snack but also a peek exposes the work of signification, of predicated action and gesture, along the fissure of the signified. To put it more in Agamben’s way, in Twemlow’s case “taking” returns in (internal) repetition to expedite (and comically exploit) its own former possibility — as indeed a present(i)ment. The result, as with syl-lepsis generally: not just vectors resolved in a latent common thrust of linguistic selection but, more unsettling yet, contradiction inactivated, potential made virtual from within, otherness in action, alternativity de-livered.

Never over till its over, syllepsis opens minds as well as grammar, keeps things going and up for grabs. It gives us one syntactic timeline braided together with a syncopated grammatical strand. With closure re-sisted at the phrasal level, response is held not in check but in expectancy. Repeatedly cleaving concrete from abstract, physical from metaphysical, material from ideal, even with each cleaving to each as well, reading turns leftover into recovered potential along the sylleptic cleft. Syllep-sis does not just split the difference, it triangulates the terms of its own divide. It keeps difference alive across iteration or ellipsis, implanting

17 “Always undesignated,” the act of designation. But not always overborne by sheer message. I have in mind here Agamben’s sense, in the essay above (see note 16), that a cer-tain cut or deferral in the semantic flow “causes the word and the representation to appear as such” (1999a: 331), signifier and signified linked but discernible in their differences. The enjambed afterthought of syllepsis is a hyperstructural case in point, where the need for an adjusted meaning routes us back through the word as word, reorienting us in the variable lexicon from which it comes.

144 Garrett Stewart

the null with surplus. Time and time again, that is, syllepsis abruptly refocuses the other through the lens of the same. Reading could scarcely ask for more; just, however differently, for more of the same. We began by seeing how syllepsis might have helped philosophy think the bridged chasm — or even think the chasm bridged — between processes physical and mental. We close by stressing again the trope’s verbal occurrence as such, its language in action. For in the event of syllepsis, in its syntactic act and its resultant narratographic contract with the reader, the deed of the word countersigns itself in process.

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Ethics Syllepsis

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