Reading Hart Crane By Metonymy (Lacan, Metaphor, Riffaterre).

Abstract

I read Hart Crane's poetry metonymically in order to explore both stylistic effects and what language reveals about desire. Critics have usually read Crane by his similarities or dissimilarities with romanticism and symbolism. My word-to-word readings at least mitigate the code of meanings conventionally attached to certain words by these traditions. I also examine the metaphoric effect. Using Michael Riffaterre's systems of poetic style, I trace the textual displacements in order to overcome referential and metaphoric meaning so that the poem's significance can emerge. Transferring the displacements of linguistic metonymy onto desire in its circumventions which Jacques Lacan describes, other readings uncover the desire in language. While Chapter I concerns style, the second chapter explores Lacanian subjectivity and Crane's desire. In the first chapter I read the poems as displacements of a suppressed and minimal sentence, which is the matrix. One way in which a poet text avoids its truth is by exp and ing outward from metonym to metonym in a descriptive set which only seems to grant significance. Conversion, a change in meaning not based upon semantic similarity or its opposite, emerges as the most genuine kind of irony in some poems. Displacement also is essential to the Lacanian formulation that the unconscious is structured like a language. In the second chapter, I read desire in Crane's language according to what emerges as its dominant characteristic in a specific poem. In Lacanian terms, the particular coloring of desire and subjectivity can be represented by the different phases: the Imaginary and the splitting of desire; the name-of-the-father; and the Symbolic order. Each of these phases is revealed in different aspects of language. My readings from White Buildings, The Bridge and the Keywest collection provide a different way to underst and Crane's poetry, "logic-of-metaphor" and metaphorical language. By moving to the psychoanalytic paradigm, I read Crane's desire, human desire and the collusion between reading and writing.