[lit-ideas] Re: Grice's Colourless Green Ideas Sleep Furiously
- From: "" <dmarc-noreply@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> (Redacted sender "Jlsperanza@xxxxxxx" for DMARC)
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Tue, 29 Apr 2014 12:07:24 -0400 (EDT)
In a message dated 4/29/2014 11:17:44 A.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
omarkusto@xxxxxxxxx writes:
Any attempt to apply Grice's categories to literature, even to literary
dialogues, would have to go against his own statement that the Co-Operative
Maxims are suspended in 'fictions.' (And without the Maxims you cannot have
implicatures, either.)
... I don't think that Mary Pratt's analysis has been terribly influential
in literary studies; I remember her being mentioned occasionally, but that
is about it. I can see how some form of Griecian analysis could be applied
to novelistic dialogues, and perhaps to some forms of drama. Pratt was also
pointing out that literary narration originated from oral narrative, but I
don't think that Grice would have much to say that is illuminating about
'fictions', whether oral or written. (At most, he would say that the
co-operative maxims are suspended here, which makes them also inapplicable.)
Well, a few points:
i. Grice spends some time in the second "Logic and Conversation" lecture on
William Blake:
Never pain to tell the love,
Love that never told can be;
For the gentle wind does move
Silently, invisibly.
I told my love, I told my love,
I told her all my heart;
Trembling, cold, in ghastly fears,
Ah! she doth depart.
Soon as she was gone from me,
A traveller came by,
Silently, invisibly;
Oh was no deny.
This was first published in 1863 by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in his edition
of Blake's poems, which formed the second volume of Alexander Gilchrist's
posthumous Life of William Blake.
The fact that Grice thought his audience (Quine, Lewis, etc.) who attended
that conference would be minimally interested in 'literature' (the thing
was given as the bi-annual Philosophy-cum-Psychology series in honour of
William James) is interesting.
Grice is interested in the line:
love that never told can be.
He thinks Blake is IMPLICATING something.
Grice proposes two logical forms for the above. He starts be ignoring the
indicative mode ("which can only complicate things") in Blake's original,
and turns the thing to the indicative:
I pain to tell the love
love that never told can be
The two logical forms are:
i. I pain to tell the love that cannot be told.
ii. I pain to tell the love that, told, can never _exist_.
Grice thinks Blake is being deliberately ambiguous, thus flouting the
maxim, "avoid ambiguity".
For the record, the verse was edited from a notebook in Rossetti's
possession, now known as the Rossetti MS., containing a great number of
sketches,
draft poems, polemical prose, and miscellaneous writings, which Blake kept
by him for many years.
As the only textual authority for many of these poems is a foul paper, some
of them are partly editorial reconstructions.
In the notebook the first stanza of "Never pain to tell thy love" has been
marked for deletion.
-- or as Grice would say, 'cancellation'.
Two variant readings are sometimes found in published versions of the poem.
In the first line "seek" was deleted by Blake and replaced by "pain", and
the final line replaced the deleted version "He took her with a sigh."
As a matter of fact, Grice preferred the 'seek' variant.
It's different with
Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.
in that _MANY_ maxims are flouted (by Reeve) for poetic effect -- and
triggering a _few more_ implicatures (my favourite of which is, "Chomsky is
wrong").
Cheers,
Speranza
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