A Culture of Citation

The tradition of using the "commonplace book" to write down memorable quotes from one's reading, of citing ancient authors in support of one's points, of consulting dictionaries of quotations or anthologies of aphorisms... Not all "quotes" are aphorisms, of course, but a quote used in a particular way is an aphoristic use. This is different from citing an authority or author for the support of a more specific point.

"Lugares comunes" or "commonplaces" began to take on a more negative connotation with writers like Flaubert, with his dictionary of "received ideas." Commonplaces, received ideas, clichés, truisms, and old saws have acquire negative connotations. Someone who quotes too many proverbs is seen as incapable of original thought. The public speaker who quotes a dictionary definition or a phrase from Mark Twain begins to seem a bit hokey.

Wisdom from Alter

I was looking at Robert Alter's translation and commentary on biblical wisdom texts over the weekend. I would recommend them highly, although more for the commentary than the translations themselves.

Oxford Book of Aphorisms

This book came today. It is a little disappointing. Why couldn't he have chosen the aphorisms that I would have chosen?

Oh, wait... Never mind. I have to stop doing that.

paremiological minimum

Here is an interesting concept, the paremiological minimum, defined as the set of proverbs that any speaker of a language knows. Some may know more proverbs, but there may be some that virtually everyone knows.

Judging by my students, though, I think the number is quite small.

Arras

Ah de la vida.
Y una sed desmedida me apresura,
y un hondo amor, y un derredor urgente.

The Canary Islands poet Luis Feria published the book Arras in 1996. The word in the title means:

1. f. pl. Cosa que se da como prenda o señal en algún contrato o concierto.
2. f. pl. Conjunto de las trece monedas que, al celebrarse el matrimonio religioso, sirven como símbolo de entrega, pasando de las manos del desposado a las de la desposada y viceversa.
3. f. pl. Der. Entrega de una parte del precio o depósito de una cantidad con la que se garantiza el cumplimiento de una obligación.

The first definition is the most general and hence the most relevant: "a thing given as a token or sign in some contract or agreement." The third definition seems almost a rephrasing of this in more legalistic term: "Surrender of a part of the price, or deposit of a quantity in order to guarantee the fulfillment of an obligation."

The first line alludes to a famous sonnet by Quevedo. "Ah de la vida..." This, in turn, is a turn on the once colloquial phrase "Ah de la casa," which means basically, "Is anybody home?" The rest of the poem means, more or less, that a measureless thirst, a deep love, and an urgent environment put some kind of pressure on me. The word "derredor" is somewhat unusual but is the perfect word for this poem.

It might be stretch to call these poems aphorisms, but they have the brevity and concision of the genre. The main difference is that they are cast in the 1st person singular. They seem less generalizable, more unique to a particular sensibility.

Anthropology

I suddenly remembered that as an undergraduate I wrote a paper for an anthropology class on folklore on the Spanish refranero. It wasn't a very good paper, as I remember, but that's not important now.

This is starting to freak me out. That was 30 years ago. I know exactly who the professor is, Professor Crowley, because I knew his daughter in high school and I am FB friends with her. She does very good work on sustainibility all around the world.

Interests

I wonder what else I'm interested in but don't even know I'm interested in? It was strange to gradually realize I had a strong interest in something to which I had never given that much conscious thought.

Sententious

Aphorisms, proverbs, the other kind of texts that I am becoming interested in can have a sententious, apodictic, self-assured, or didactic tone. I can understand someone who doesn't like the genre at all for this reason. The poet Jorge Riechmann told me once that he didn't distrusted aphorisms because of their apodictic nature. I was a bit confused because he had just handed me a copy of his book of original aphorisms.

I can understand not likely the particular sensibility behind a certain author of aphorisms. As with any genre, there are differences in sensibility. I just ordered a copy of Christopher Maurer's translation of Gracián. This book (Maurer's translation) actually became a best seller, because people love pithy didacticism. Not everyone, of course, but a lot of people.

Everyone has proverbs in his or her vocabulary, even if they are only mottoes from the world of sports of advertising or the self-help culture, or jokes from Mark Twaiin like "Golf: a good walk spoiled." It would be interesting to do some experimental research on this, to see what people know actively and passively.

Anticlerical proverbs

In the Spanish tradition there are many anticlerical proverbs, like

Con putas y frailes, ni camines ni andes. (With whores and friars, neither walk nor walk.) There are also misogynist ones, or simply ones in which the woman is the indirect source of misfortune.

Eramos muchos y parió la suegra. / Eramos muchos y parió la suegra. (We were too many already, and grandma / mother-in-law gave birth.)

Mujer que sabe latín, no encuentra marido ni tiene buen fin. (The educated woman, a woman who knows Latin, won't find a husband or come to a good end.)

Proverbs, then, are the source of knowledge about popular ideology. I don't know any pro-clerical or feminist proverbs from the oral tradition.

Still more aphorisms

I had forgotten completely about Wallace Stevens's aphorisms. This subject is getting better and better all the time. I simply have to open up my memory to where other examples come flooding back. This would be an outline of a lecure on the subject:

The pre-Socratic aphorism (Heraclitus). Here the aphorism appears to be a form of precursor to all philosophy itself.

The Humanist aphorism (Erasmus). Aphorisms in the humanist age reflect the idea that human cultures themselves are repositories of wisdom. The Marqués de Santillana collected proverbs in "Refranes que dizen las viejas tras el fuego."

The baroque aphorism (Gracián). Associations with wit (ingenio).

The neo-classical / enlightenment aphorism. Aphorism is the voice of reasonableness but also of paradox.

The Romantic aphorism (Blake).

The decadent aphorism. (Wilde)

The modernist aphorism. Juan Ramón Jiménez / Wallace Stevens.

The late modernist aphorism...

Various sources of distrust for the form. It is too sententious, too categorical. It commands assent that we might not want to give it.

JRJ

Juan Ramón Jiménez wrote several thousand aphorisms. It was one of his favorite literary forms. Of course, since the aphorism is considered a rather minor genre, this work is largely invisible except to specialists in Juan Ramón.

Two Kinds of Paradox

I think that there are two kinds of paradox in the proverb or aphorism. One seems to go against the doxa but really doesn't. "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer." It is paradoxical from a naive perspective, but it expresses the actual ideology of the community. Or LaRochefoucauld: "There are women who have never had a love affair, but very few who have had just one."

The other kind of paradox presents a belief that really is not socially acceptable. Here the aphorist is original and truly paradoxical. The aphorism does not command assent but puzzlement. To agree with the aphorism is to cross over to another kind of belief. (Oscar Wilde).

Asian Figures

The Asian aphorisms that Merwin translated. Not my favorite poet (Merwin) but I love this particular book. I've used these in my refanero, cancionero, romancero class, but I'm going to use them also in my course "from idiom to proverb" in the fall. I can incorporate material from Lakoff and Turner's More than Cool Reason (where they analyze some of these proverbs in their final chapter). It is cognitive linguistics, right? So I can combine my interest in wisdom literature with my interest in clichés and idioms, putting Lakoff together with Sinclair. I'm brilliant today.

More aphorisms

I knew that I had always been interested in aphorisms, but I just today remembered that I had written a whole mess of them in the late 80 and early 90s. Amazingly, after realizing this, my eyes rose to a bookshelf and I saw a folder of poems that I had bound up together with a spiral binding back then. It was my never published book of poems Introspectionist's Folly, which includes a section called "Parables and Aphorisms."

The funny thing is I didn't even think of these the last two times I taught parts of courses on the aphorism as a genre. Maybe because I was working mostly with the popular proverb and not the authored aphorism. Maybe because I have a bad memory for my own writing (but usually I don't.)

Anyway, I will be posting some of the old ones on twitter. Search me out at jmayhew1.

Semantic Prosody

More thought about the idiom principle.

The British linguist John Sinclair developed the term "semantic prosody.' This is not really prosody at all, but the connotational pattern in which a word is found. For example, the word "budge" might have a pattern for being used in situations of recalcitrant resistance. Sinclair says that the word "happen" has a semantic prosody of negative events. In other words, the word happen is more likely to be found connected to words like "accident."

What makes this kind of linguistics possible are the existence of huge corpora of language use. You don't simply ask a native speaker for her intuitions about the word budge, but instead you look at a huge corpus of authentic material and see what actually happens. Sinclair's motto was "trust the text."

I'm finding Sinclair's book Trust the Text to be very stimulating reading. My idea is to give a course for advanced language students (the highest level language course we have for undergraduates graduating with a major in Spanish) on idioms and proverbs. Students will learn idioms, increasingly their fluency, and also explore some the concepts developed by linguists like Sinclair. I think certain words in Spanish proverbs have a certain "semantic prosody." Think of the word pan or bread. The meaning of this word is its semantic prosody, its tendency to co-occur with other words or concepts. A refranero of sufficient size would then constitute a corpus in which to analyze the "co-text" of certain words.

As Barthes wrote of LaRochefoucauld, you can look at an aphorism for its individual meaning, or structurally. We can learn the meaning of dozens of individual idioms (a valuable thing to do) or we can look for patterns, the semantic prosody of idioms.

The word santo occurs in several idioms. "No es santo de mi devoción." (He is not saint to which I am particularly devoted.) Or "a santo de qué" (what the hell gives you the right?). One thing we could do, then, is look for the semantic prosody of idiomatic uses of this word.

My hypothesis is that the proverb is the idiom at the level of the sentence. You could use part of a proverb in another sentence, citing it fragmentarily or paraphrasing it. Then that part of the proverb would be an idiom or modismo.

Aphorisms and Paradox

The aphorism or proverb is not necessarily paradoxical. Many are not, of course. The ones I like best, however, happen to have that element of surprise. In William Blake and in Oscar Wilde this tendency reached its apogee. To lose one parent is a misfortune. To lose both begins to look like carelessness.

Doxa is belief. The words orthodox, heterodox, refer to beliefs that are in favor or out of favor with secular or religious authorities. Paradox is something against common belief (Barthes loved to cite that etymology).

So most proverbs are going to express doxa, common belief. They can nevertheless present doxa as paradoxa. Your friends are more likely to betray you than your enemies, for example. That's a common belief, if you trust the proverbs, but it is paradoxical from the naive view that friends are better than enemies. So the didacticism of the proverb goes against the naive doxa, replacing it with the cynical one.

The aphorism cannot just present an ostensibly "false belief." The paradox has to make sense on some level, to command assent. "Most people do not know their mother's first name" is not a good aphorism because the falsity just sits there and does nothing.

Vicente Núñez called his aphorisms "sofismas" or sophisms. Sophistry, of course, is a method of philosophical instruction criticized by Plato for its lack of interest in the truth. So VN was saying "don't trust what I'm saying," I'm sophistical. But also: my aphorisms are paradoxical and they might challenge your beliefs.

Blake

I believe my interest in aphorisms arose with Blake's "Proverbs of Hell." I founded an avant-garde movement when I was 15 and one of the first works produced was "The Proverbs of Schmo." I was the only member of this movement, though some of my friends knew about it. I had also read the book of Proverbs from the Bible.

There are four main genres of literature, we hear: poetry, mostly lyric poetry. Drama (plays of different kinds). Narrative fiction, short and long. Essays: literary prose that is non-fiction.

Obviously that is not quite right. Not all poetry is lyric. Epic poetry is narrative "fiction," but not prose. We also have satire, panegyric, diaries and letters that are literary prose but not "essays." Chronicles, testimonies, blogs... The tripart classification of poetry, drama, and narrative, with a huge miscellaneous category of "essay" added on is very inadequate because then everything else become a mere hybrid or exception.

The aphorism is its own animal, not a hybrid between two other genres but its own beast. I suppose you could derive it from the epigram and make it a form of short lyric poetry, but that doesn't seem historically accurate to me. We could see it as the shortest form of didactic literature, akin to the fable, the parable, the exemplum. That doesn't sit right with me either. Aphorisms are not narratives or "miscellaneous non-fiction prose of some literary value" like the letters of great writers. They are the fifth genre.

What gives an identity to this genre? I don't really know yet and I'm thinking out loud here. Maybe it is the idea of making a collection of utterances all in the same category. The aphorism always needs other aphorisms to keep it company.

La Rochefoucauld

I've always loved La Rochefoucauld. I say "always," because I know that I knew about him at least in high school (before college), because I wrote a poem in which I used his name. I might have come across his name in a poem by Ashbery, or in French class, I don't really know. Later I'm sure i studied Barthes's great essay on La R.

The idea behind the maxims is a kind of base-line cynicism. Good deeds can flow from less than noble motives, or vice-versa. Self-regard or pride (amour-propre) is the main human motivation. Humans act in a way that seems paradoxical but is not once you uncover their motives.

"Il y a des méchants qui seraient moins dangereux s'ils n'avaient aucune bonté." (There are evil people who would be less dangerous if they didn't have a little good in them.)

"La clémence des princes n'est souvent qu'une politique pour gagner l'affection des peuples." (The leniency of princes is often nothing more than a policy to win the affection of populations.)

"La vertu n'irait pas loin si la vanité ne lui tenait compagnie." (Virtue wouldn't get very far without vanity to keep it company.)

"L'intérêt parle toutes sortes de langues et joue toutes sortes de personnages, même celui de désintéressé." (Interest speaks all sorts of languages and plays all sorts of characters, including the character of "disinterested.").

I guess all this cynicism could get tiresome, were it not for the wonderful stylistic balance of the sentences:

"Tout le monde se plaint de sa mémoire, et personne ne se plaint de son jugement." (Everyone complains about their bad memory, nobody about their bad judgment."

So LaR, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, Ramón Gómez de la Serna. Nick Piombino. Who are the great aphorists?

You can't translate Barbara Guest into French, since her poetry is already written in French.