PARTISAN
REVIEW
5041
quite casually earlier in the work, these images now provide new al–
ternatives for feelings unresolved or misdirected when the images
were first used. The principle of equivalence is inadequate to account
for the imaginative work which produces ri chly asymetri cal structures.
Repetition in the
Odes
makes for nothing but lopsided spatial dia–
grams if it is not considered in terms of Claudel"s efforts to imagine
and guarantee a continuous process of procreation in the universe –
the continuity of paternity from God to His creation, from fathers to
sons, from the Christian poet to the praise he gives birth to in his
readers, and from the poet's inspiration to the poetic time which
inspiration engenders.
Even in Valery, whose poems offer innumerable sound repeti–
tions, the static structural diagram which could depict all the rhymes,
assonances and alliterations in a poem would miss what makes them
different from similar patterns of monotonously "musical" sound in
Poe. Valery's subtle play prevents us from making that immediate,
inevitable parallelism between sound and sense which Jakobson takes
for granted. Excessive sound repetitions in Valery often prohibit or at
least arrest the perception of similarity or equivalence which super–
ficially they appear to encourage. In such cases, repeated figures of
sound (frequently in conjunction with inverted word order ) work to
postpone our perception of meaning. (Geoffrey Hartman has subtly
defined this technique of postponement in his section on Valery in
The Unmediat ed Vision. )
Valery very skillfully keeps us in a state of
suspension between a slightly stupefying musicality and explicit,
didactic philosophical statement (Alain compared Valery to Lucre–
tius ) . This continuous moving between sound and sense subvert'>
both the primitive pleasure of mindless sound repetition and the im–
mediate congealing of sound into meaning. Language as no-sense acts
as a kind of pedagogical corrective to that secure faith in sound as
the "prompter" of sense which so neatly - too neatly - supplements
Jakobson 's linguistic parallelisms. The comfort of much bad poetry
is that it reinforces that faith; the poems of Valery, on the other hand,
educate us into a useful suspicion about the regularities which poetry
both imposes on linguistic sequences and exposes as inadequate struc–
tures for the poetic message.
Ruwet, as we have seen, has expressed some skepticism about the
value of structural linguistics for literary analysis. But Ruwet's own
