The Constructivist Moment. Barrett Watten
In extending the presumed benefits of the administered control of meaning to the world at large (not simply the then-English-speaking world but the expanding worlds of international and colonial capitalism), Ogden and Richards attempted a modern interpretation of the paradigms for meaning that Coleridge tried to resolve in the Biographia and elsewhere.13
BASIC, of course, failed both in its semantic claim to reduce the number of terms necessary for transparent communication and in its proposals for a new world order based on the efficiencies to be gained by such linguistic condensation.14 Responsibility for this failure may be located squarely in the Coleridgean notion of desynonymy (as will be developed below), an imperative for the finer distinction of terms that was Coleridge’s response to the epistemological uncertainty of new meaning. Rather than achieving its goal of controlling the expansion of meaning by standardizing terms, BASIC’s resynonymy of vocabulary simply further confused the relation of language to meaning. As one historian of language has commented, “The Basic words, mainly common, short words like get, make, do, have some of the widest ranges of meaning in the language and may be among the most difficult to learn adequately. [It was] reported that for the 850 words the OED lists no fewer than 18,416 senses.”15 BASIC spectacularly failed to control the proliferation of meaning; rather, only an increase in undecidability and thus imprecision could result. In the end, BASIC takes its place within a pantheon of failed utopian projects for language in modernism, from Wittgenstein’s Tractactus to Esperanto to Louis Zukofsky’s “doing away with epistemology” to Laura Riding’s critique of “rational meaning.”16
But this failure, which took until the 1980s to be finalized with the discontinuance of Ogden’s General Basic English Dictionary, led to some exemplary modernist literary responses (parodic as much as serious) by admirers of both the advantages and defects of BASIC’s restricted semantics. As a direct response to the challenge of the increased vocabulary in James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, for example, the international avant-garde magazine transition ran a translation of Joyce’s prose into BASIC, “the international language in which everything may be said,” with an explanatory note by C. K. Ogden, in its March 1932 issue.17 Ogden later compared Joyce’s lexicon of “500,000 words” with BASIC’s core vocabulary of 850; there is evident fascination here not only with BASIC’s ability to translate Joyce but also with the juxtaposition of two languages representing each half of the modernism/modernity dyad. Bringing together literary modernism and rationalized modernity would highlight the experimental and progressive natures of both: “The normal process of putting complex ideas of men of letters into Basic English is through the use of foot-notes. . . . But Mr. Joyce was of the opinion that a comparison of the two languages would be of greater interest if the Basic English were printed without the additions necessary to make the sense more complete. In this way the simplest and most complex languages of man are placed side by side” (135) — with no loss in translation and even some justice to the rhythms of Joyce’s prose:
1. The BASIC English Word List.
Well, you know or don’t you kennet or haven’t I told you every story has an end and that’s the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dusk is growing. Fieluhr? Filou! What age is it? It saon is late.
Well are you conscious, or haven’t you knowledge, or haven’t I said it, that every story has an ending and that’s the he and the she of it. Look, look, the dark is coming. . . . ‘Viel Uhr? Filou! What time is it? It’s getting late. (136-37)
Where for Ogden this meeting of “simplest and most complex languages” showed BASIC’s ability to turn Joyce’s opacity into transparency, modernist readers may have come to other conclusions about the experiment. Two disjunct and equally opaque passages seem the result of this effort at transparency, and modernist writers could identify with either — they could continue their literary experiments (as technological innovators) while being confirmed in their elite cultural perspectives (as “men of letters,” members of the modernist clerisy whose “obscure meanings” are valorized by Ogden’s attention). It is not surprising that the perceived opacity, rather than transparency, of language in BASIC’s translation of Joyce would lead, over the next fifty years and in several schools of writers, to experiments with the constructive effects of restricted vocabularies in poetry.
The radical discontinuity between Coleridge’s critique of poetic diction and postmodern constructions of poetic vocabulary, then, is connected through their mediation by a modernist project of linguistic reform that Richards later called a technocratic process of “Language Control.”18 The seemingly strained juxtaposition of BASIC English with Joyce’s “Work in Progress” in transition shows a modernist fascination and horror with the social hygiene of restricted vocabulary as a rational counterpoint to the possibly contagious avant-garde poetics of Eugene Jolas’s “Revolution of the Word.” Epistemological concerns with new meaning, reflecting a tension between progressive rationality and modernist experiments, were at the center of Jolas’s program for modernism, to the extent that the same issue of transition that printed Joyce’s text in BASIC also ran a section titled “Laboratory of the Word,” which called at once for “A New Symbolical Language,” reflecting poetry’s spiritual concerns, and “A New Communicative Language,” related to questions of new meaning. While transition argued for the “pre-logical functions” of language, it also lamented “a vocabulary that statically retains now obsolete words and is unaware of the enormous changes in meaning that have occurred,” concluding, “We need a twentieth-century dictionary!” (297). This Jolas supplied in the form of a “Revolution of the Word Dictionary” that listed neologisms taken from modernist authors such as Joyce, Bob Brown, Abraham Lincoln Gillespie, and himself and that also retired words such as humanism, democracy, and nightingale from “active service” (fig. 2). While generally hostile to technology (“Transition is against the mechanical language”; 322), Jolas encouraged a wide range of investigation into linguistic phenomena, including an essay by Jean Paulhan on words as signs, speculations on the language of dreams and the unconscious, examples of the trans-sense language of Hugo Ball and Kurt Schwitters, and transcriptions of the rhythms of African-American language. Transition’s focus on language “as such,” of course, was a part of a wider concern in Anglo-American modernism with language as a site of social modernity that began, arguably, with Gertrude Stein and that extended to the Harlem Renaissance. The Objectivist poets, particularly Louis Zukofsky, further articulated this debate from its moment in transition through the 1930s and onward, shifting the formal paradigm of language to constructivist goals that would lead to the possibility of making poetry out of preexisting vocabularies, a project later taken up in the chance-generated work of Jackson Mac Low and the work of the Language School. The encounter between the avant-garde use of “language as such” and the emergence of new technical senses, evident in transition’s translation of Joyce into BASIC but also its dictionary of new meaning, thus arrives at a historically unique development in modern writing, the making of literary works from a pre-given vocabulary.
2. “transition’s Revolution of the Word Dictionary.” From transition 21 (March 1932).
As Joseph M. Conte has shown, there have been any number of poetic strategies in which literature is generated by virtue of what he calls procedural form, from early modern sestinas to the linguistic and formal constraints of the French OuLiPo.19 Procedural form in the modernist and postmodern period shares with the literary use of poetic vocabulary an open approach to the construction of meaning, in Umberto Eco’s sense of an open work; as Conte writes, “Procedural form is a generative structure that constrains the poet to encounter and examine that which he or