Suzanne W. Churchill

Blog

What Does the Fox Say? Onomatopoeia & the myth of pure language

by

This weekend my sons have been belting out lines from the Norwegian duo Ylvis’s viral video, “What Does the Fox Say?” Fortunately, a student in my seminar had introduced me to the video last week, so I was able to impress my sons by joining in. “You know that song?” Zac asked incredulously, to which I replied, “Joff-tchoff-tchoffo-tchoffo-tchoff!”

Like 3 million others, I found the video to be funny and infectious—an irresistible sing-along song the likes of which I haven’t enjoyed since my girl-scouting days. As Devon Maloney points out in Underwire, the song doesn’t just get stuck in your head, it messes with your head, raising existential questions that have troubled philosophers and poets for centuries:

Like, “Why am I still hopelessly stuck on the insanely catchy clutches of a song about animal noises?” and “Should I be reevaluating my own understanding of animal noises? Do elephants really go … “toot”? And of course, the most important question of all: “Wait, seriously, what sound does a fox make?”

According to my other son Luke, “We actually know what a fox says, Mom. It screams, and it sounds a lot like a human scream.”

Such an empirical solution to the song’s driving question may satisfy the scientifically minded, but it doesn’t solve the song’s semiotic mystery. “What does the fox say?” is not about animals that sound like humans, but about humans trying to sound like animals, or more precisely, humans trying to come up with words to represent animal sounds. The song captures our love affair with onomatopoeia, words that sound like the thing they refer to or describe. Animal noises are some of the most common onomatopoetic words and are often the first words acquired by babies, who learn to say “moo” and “quack” almost as soon as they say “mama” and “dada.” (The video’s scenes of an elderly man reading to a child seem particularly instructive here.) Part of what’s funny and pleasurable about the “What Does the Fox Say?” video is that adults at a cocktail party, champagne tulips in hand, are indulging in an infantile urge to mimic the animal world.

What makes the video even funnier is that the adults don’t really look like the animals they represent. This is not the cast of Cats, whose feline purring, pawing, and rubbing suggest a more disturbingly adult form of zoophilia. Rather, in the children’s picture-book world of “What Does the Fox Say?” the humans are clearly human. By the time the elephant man descends from the porch saying, “toot,” we recognize that his “toot” resembles an elephant about as much as his costume does, which is to say: not much. The animal costumes and sounds in “What Does the Fox Say?” are mimetic not of real animals, but of the simplified, cartoon-like icons that we use to represent animals.

In this way, “What Does the Fox Say?” delivers a sophisticated language lesson. It highlights the human desire for a pure language, in which words magically correspond to the things they represent. Yet it also exposes the myth of pure language. Linguists like Saussure teach us that language is arbitrary—that words have no innate connection to the things they represent. There’s nothing particularly catlike about the word “cat.” Instead, “cat” refers to a cat because it is not a “bat” or a “hat.” Similarly, the words “neigh” and “horse” are no closer to the equus feras than they would be if spelled out in “morse” code (here again, the video seems uncannily wise in asking if a h0-0-0-0rse would recognize its name in mo-0-0rse code). Words acquire meaning through their system in a chain of signifiers, not because of any innate connection to the things they represent. Because onomatopoeic words differ across languages (a dog says “ouah-ouah” in French and “kien-kien” in Japanese), we know that even these “sound-alike” terms conform to linguistic codes rather than to natural sounds.

Still from What Does the Fox Say videoOnomatopoeia comes from the Greek words for name + making. It reflects the basic human urge to name things—to capture and communicate the essence of things. Yet term’s root exposes the problem: we make the names; we don’t find or discover them. Although we want to know things as they are, our efforts to name them are mere approximations. Still the drive to know and name remains strong. “What is your sound… Will we ever know,” the lead singer croons, lamenting (or perhaps celebrating) that what the fox says “will always be a mystery.” In this way, the video really does entertain existential questions that philosophers and poets have been pondering for centuries.

Playing in the Dark with Whitman

by

Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” is a powerful elegy for Abraham Lincoln—a personal remembrance that also serves as a national memorial, uniting a deeply divided nation in a communal song of praise and mourning. As much as I love this poem, however, I am troubled by it. In sections 5 & 6, Whitman pans out to give us a vast panorama of the U.S., describing the land, cities, lanes, woods, fields, orchards, and streets through which Lincoln’s coffin passed. In Section 5, he catalogs the features of the natural world (grass, wheat, and apple trees), and in Section 6, he depicts the human landscape:

Coffin that passes through lanes and streets,
Through day and night with the great cloud darkening the land,
With the pomp of the inloop’d flags with the cities draped in black,
With the show of the States themselves as of crape-veil’d women standing,
With processions long and winding and the flambeaus of the night,
With the countless torches lit, with the silent sea of faces and the unbared heads

Theo James, "There Is No Dark Side of the Moon."
Theo James, “There Is No Dark Side of the Moon.”

Why doesn’t Whitman include any African American laborers the fertile fields of section 5, or mention any African American faces or “unbared [brown] heads” in lines of mourning in section 6? Of course, you can argue (and probably will) that Whitman’s depiction of nature includes no people, that he is attempting to create a vision of natural bounty, in which nature’s plenty can nourish and replenish the war-torn land.  And you can argue (and probably will) that his portrayal of the American people is not race specific because he wants to project an image of national unity, in which “the thousand voices rising strong and solemn” sing together in unison. I won’t disagree with you on these points, yet I still think the absence of explicit racial signifiers is remarkable in a poem dedicated to the president who had just put an end to slavery. This absence is especially striking, given the symbolic presence of the “great cloud darkening the land.” There is darkness haunting the poem, and it is a darkness worth scrutinizing.

Toni Morrison’s essay “Black Matters”  helps explain how the repressed presence of African Americans returns in the form of a dark cloud that haunts the poem—what she would call an “Africanist presence.” Morrison rejects the assumption “that traditional, canonical American literature is free of, uninformed by, and unshaped by the four-hundred-year-old presence of first Africans and then African Americans in the United States” (31). Rather, she insists, an Africanist presence is crucial to the formation of American literature, although it often surfaces in oblique, coded ways. She introduces us to this troubling idea gently, writing:

I have begun to wonder whether the major, much celebrated themes of American literature—individualism, masculinity, the conflict between social engagement and historical isolation, an acute and ambiguous moral problematic, the juxtaposition of innocence with figures representing death and hell—are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding Africanist  presence. …A real or fabricated Africanist presence has been crucial to the writers’ sense of their Americanness. And it shows: through significant and underscored omissions, startling contradictions, heavily nuanced conflicts, and the way their work is peopled with the signs and bodies of this presence. (310)

African Americans are a “significant…omission” in Whitman’s elegy, but the poem is nevertheless “peopled with the signs and bodies of this presence.” The repressed African American people return in the symbolic form of the “Dark Mother always gliding near with soft feet” (line 143). This shadowy figure of death serves as the necessary darkness against which Whitman can recognize own vitality and affirm the continuity of a nation in crisis. The poem represses the race issues that divide the nation, only to resurrect them in a unifying symbolic figure of the Dark Mother. Perhaps we can appreciate the full power of Whitman’s great elegy only when we acknowledge the symbolic power of Africanism in his poetic restoration of American national identity.

 

 

Self-portraits in painting and poetry

by

IMG_0998The painting on my home page is one I did when I was a senior at Middlebury College. I was doing a series of small paintings of unoccupied park benches. I was on my second or third sitting of this bench, which faces the mountains to the west of campus. When I arrived at my perch, I was annoyed to find another student painter had inserted herself between me and my vista. I decided to paint her in to my composition. Because she had the same brown pony tail and blue sweatshirt as I, everyone assumed the painting was a self-portrait. And that’s what it became.

The portrait is both me and not me, which is really what any self-portrait is. A self-portrait depicts you as someone else—someone outside your head and body, who exists on canvas, paper, or, in my case, particle board. When you look at painter’s self-portrait, you never delude yourself into think you’re actually looking at the artist himself—not even when you’re looking at a self-portrait by Rembrandt, whose flesh tones pulse with blood and whose eyes follow your gaze. What’s so astonishing about Rembrandt’s self-portraits is that, for all their life-likeness, you can never forget that you’re looking at paint, paint that has been artfully manipulated to create an illusion of proximity and personhood.

Self-portraiture in poetry is a different story. When you read a poem, it’s easy to feel like you’re reading the poet’s mind. The lyric “I” creates the illusion that you’re having an intimate encounter with the poet, who is expressing her innermost thoughts and emotions. It feels like you’re in touch with the poet herself. Our confusion is registered in the different articles we use to refer to poems and paintings: when we read a poem, we say, “that’s T. S. Eliot,” as if the poem were the poet, whereas when we see a painting, we say, “that’s a Rembrandt,” acknowledging the work as a related but separate entity.

Poetry readers should take a lesson from painting. Recognize that when you read a poem by T. S. Eliot, you’re no more in touch with Eliot himself than you are face-to-face with Rembrandt when you look at his self-portrait. When you read a poem written in the first person, you’re not reading the poet’s mind, you’re reading words, words that have been artfully manipulated to create an illusion of intimacy and personhood. Yes, the illusion bears a resemblance to the real person. But the self-portrait is not the person; it’s an artful composition.

In the same way, everything I write about myself on this blog is a form of self-portraiture. Squint carefully as you read and you can probably pick out the brush strokes.

Earth receive two honored guests

by Leave a Comment

Earth, receive an honoured guest:

William Yeats is laid to rest.

Let the Irish vessel lie

Emptied of its poetry.

– W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”

We lost two great writers recently: Elmore Leonard and Seamus Heaney. It would be hard to think of two celebrated contemporary writers whose styles differ more. American novelist Leonard wrote taught, stark, hard-boiled crime fiction that makes your heart race, while Irish poet Heaney wrote rich, sensory, densely layered poetry that makes you feel the peat between your teeth.

Full disclosure: I haven’t read Leonard’s novels yet, but his obituary in the New York Times makes me want to. His 10 rules of writing model his pithy style and tell you how to achieve it. “Try to leave out the parts that readers tend to skip,” he advises, and, “If it sounds like writing, rewrite it.”

I just broke one of Leonard’s rules by using a verb other than “said” to frame his quotations. But maybe that’s because at heart I’m a sucker for writing that sounds like writing, which is what Heaney gives us. In his defense, Heaney gives us writing that sounds like writing that sounds like “the squelch and slap / of soggy peat” and emits “the cold smell of potato mould.” His poetry is so richly sensory that it makes you aware of language as a thick loam that you can build mud castles with. Check out his poem, “Digging.”

As Leonard’s 10 rules and Heaney’s “Digging” show, one thing both writers have in common is a sense of humor. They are masters of their craft, and they have fun with it. Maybe that should be rule #11: Have fun with it.