“Theory drips at the edge of a cartoon.”

“Garfield” the title

The meanings of the title exemplify a dissipation or cross-purposing of what I'm going to call abstract "types" or categories, a process that in my reading of Garfield seems to be integral to the unfolding exploratory character of the text’s language.

Starting with the title: “Garfield”? I casually think, okay, the comic strip. I begin to doubt myself however, on reading the dedication — since two proximate cartoony names (Garfield and Alto) seems incongruous, unless the text is going to be about cartoons (and it’s not). I’m sitting up a bit by now, thinking the title just can’t be referring to an assassinated 19C president, that’s too bio-fictional. But then how is Garfield the cat not more fictional? Or will the word “Garfield” be deployed as an index of mass cultural attachments?

Nothing prepares me for this note about Garfield found at the back of the Alphabet: “Written In a giant Garfield drawing notebook on deeply colored construction paper.” So: none of the above.

It’s not the name (“Garfield”) but the thing (Garfield drawing notebook used writing Garfield), not the idea (“A cynical, lazy, lasagna-loving, Monday-hating, dog-punting, mailman-mauling fat cat” [gocomics.com]) but the circumscribed act (of writing ((imagine writing — or are you drawing — on red, green, yellow, blue construction paper, every time having to flip past a Garfield image on the cover — and where are you when you’re doing this, are you alone, or who with?)).

Two Ways of Reading

We can read for Garfield’s patterns in two ways. These are ways of reading that are connected to each other, one way useful for much of Ron Silliman’s writing (he theorized it as the New Sentence), the other way specific to his text Garfield collected in Demo to Ink and in the Alphabet.

First and primary way: finding interlocking meanings between sentences within each stanza-paragraph. We can do that with Garfield and with almost any Silliman text — even those that aren’t in prose-sentence form. This way of reading is often fuzzier than the tightly scripted outcome of an implicature. Two successive sentences from Garfield’s second stanza-paragraph: “Spider plant’s new shoot seeks a window. Four wings are less efficient than two.” What’s their connection? They bristle with contrasts — between plant/animal, new/old, slow/fast, ontogeny/phylogeny, absolute/relative, organic/inorganic (inorganic if “wings” refers to those of a plane). Is that it, though, potential forms of contrast? What have wings to do with plants? A reader is encouraged to make an interpretive leap. Evolutionary theory and the mode of scientific observation seem to connect them: window means light means growth, and efficiency can be thought of as an evolutionary measure of success at flight or pollination.

The second way of reading for patterns, a way specific to Garfield, involves finding meaning-echoes across sentence types from stanza-paragraph to stanza-paragraph. H.G. Widdowson explains the token/type distinction which strikes me as useful to make in this literary context: “To identify an element as a token […] is to recognize it as a particular and actual instance of a general and abstract type” (Linguistics). There are 21 sentences in each of the 21 stanza-paragraphs of Garfield, and there are presumably 21 token sentence variations on each of 21 sentence types.

The 21 token sentences of a given type will be different from each other in every stanza-paragraph. These tokens will also be differently ordered in each stanza-paragraph according to how the writer configures patterns for the first way of reading — the interlocking meanings between sentences. Sentence #1 in stanza-paragraph #1 may have its type-associated other token sentence to be found in the #5 position in the next stanza-paragraph, etc.

Sometimes the type is quite perceptible: recipe (token e.g.: “Serve at room temperature.”); poet/poetry mention (“There, it was Tom who freed the line.”; ); “word salad” sentence (“Stereo koala penetrates breath of math.”); dog mention (“Snarling, baring its teeth.”); x vs. y structure (“Steaming vs. cancelled.”); x and y structure (“Spiral and inky.”); art/artist mention (“Picasso’s line was manic.”); use of first person pronoun in an autobiographical sentence (“The name on my first book was Ronald.”); radical left political faction mention (“The then Trotskyist SWP.”); names mention (“This is called a Phillips.”); employment mention (“Working as a nurse or cabbie, studying anthropology (art).”

But in some cases, the token becomes difficult to slot into a type (i.e., there is no aspect of language beyond the reach of change, no Archimedian still-point of reference). Reading one stanza-paragraph after another, a reader in this circumstance will continue revising how best to name (and thereby identify) the type in question, sometimes arriving at the last stanza-paragraph inconclusively, the type having dispersed all identifying markers — and this is reflexively part of the text as well, I think: theorizing tokens versus types. Linguists, too, wonder: “The question arises as to what the grounds are for distinguishing different types?” (Widdowson). Identification requires recognition; but language doesn’t.

So: the token “old webs” (taken from stanza-paragraph 1, Sentence 2) suggests a meaning-connection to token “spider plant” (sp2, S5) which suggests spider (sp3, S5) which suggests web-“mummified” fly (sp4, S6) which suggests figural beyond literal meanings for arachnid behaviour (sp5, S6) which suggests fly as a machine (sp6, S5) which suggests — here I’m going to quote entire sentence to give idea of how a web associated with spiders combines with spider plant that implies potted whose pottedness is then embellished upon — “A potted pine webbed with tinsel” (sp 7, S19), etc.

The tokens can vary from their type such that some token sentences apply to more than one type, sharing words previously identified with another type, as in: “There was Littlebit, talking to Spider.” This token sentence suggests both the names mention type (Littlebit, Spider) and the spider mention type (spider). A number of the sample sentences listed above also intersect type categories.

Compositional Structure

The second way of reading Garfield for patterns suggests that we take a guess at how its composition was conceived or begun. The text (as is often the case with Silliman) drops a metacomment which can be taken as a hint about this: “This is not the sequence of composition,” but I am speculating.

I imagine a grid, where columns identify types, and rows describe tokens of those types, so that in column 1 there is one type (say, spider mention) for which, in row 1, the writer creates 21 token sentence variations on that type. Once the grid is filled out like that, Silliman begins to compose his paragraphs by drawing down the sentences and combining them in an order that best induces the first way of reading. As he transcribes, he might have to change some of the sentences as needed. Gradually, some results subtly diverge from model, sometimes a lot, sometimes a little.

The Paradigmatic

I’m tempted to think of Garfield paradigmatically, aware that Silliman takes farthest a fundamental lesson from modern linguistics — about how meaning is created out of difference — that exceeds any proposed paradigmatic case.

What I’m after, though, is the paradigmatic itself, the axis of association from which selection is made for syntactic combination. The slot in the syntactic combination “Close the _____ door” could be paradigmatically filled and substituted for barn, oven, fridge, car, garage, cargo, office, cabin, green, wood, damn, etc.

Garfield’s second way of reading for patterns encourages reading for the paradigmatic, which gives its form a gem-like, fine watch (!) quality.

A paradigmatic reading is a substitutive one, one token for another of its type. There is combination creating variation within the sentence and between sentences, but combination overall, in the second way of reading for patterns, is subordinated to the greater associational movement of substitution which exists at a structural level of the text. In a modernist and pre-modernist text, if I generalize wildly, that greater substitutive movement exists at the structural level at which the text integrates into “literature itself.” In a postmodern text such as Garfield, I’m not convinced that the paradigm is Literature, although inevitably Garfield is a literary text and will be absorbed into literature. What I mean is that there is no motivation I can find in the text for creating meaningful resonances with cultural tradition (language understood as system allows for a break with cultural tradition); I feel no inclination to substitute the spider mention type for some archetypical literary spider, for example.

Instead, the words remains tokens of a language (itself a somewhat nebulous category), and the relationship to the extralinguistic world (“things”), though deliberately troubled, remains present throughout the paradigmatic reading of Garfield. The text floats unanchored above the extralinguistic world, but that world is unmistakably there. What’s absent is the habitual directional signage gaining privileged access to it.

Where does the idea of structure come from in Garfield, which allows for the idea of a paradigmatic reading? As Barthes might put it, there is no proairetic code (acts in sequence): recipe instructions that by the twenty-first paragraph haven’t cooked anything yet; etiquette instructions that don’t eventuate in a layed table; one could go on listing how types don’t obtain outcomes. Perhaps the only narrative that progresses is the one about the writer writing, for “Midcareer, I opened the door to the ocean.” is the last sentence, suggesting a reminiscence about the moment of conceiving the Alphabet project.

General Point

A general point about a Silliman text: Any enactment in a sentence is, at the same time, an example of an enactment in a sentence. Exemplarity is paradigmatic.

Exemplarity predominates over enactment in a paradigmatic reading. The compactness of the paragraphs and of the sentences (most of them are under fifteen words, and the longer ones have a crisply demarcated style) also contribute to the paradigmatic structural effects.

The Fine Watch

“Keep the tone even and soothing.”

Garfield’s surface presentation to the reader is of a jeweled perfection, a splendidly accurate mechanism for linguistic measurement.

Garfield has a stately, procedural cadence, due to paradigmatic design. Each sentence is well-turned, well-considered, well-placed. Tokens to enter the slots of types — three cherries! The formal satisfaction of its world is the pretense of an experiment.

The experiment belies its own textual world.

Just the way a product belies its manufacturing process. Old-timey Marx has some wonderful pages on watchmaking (“that classical example of heterogeneous manufacture”), naming the micro-divisions of labour imposed on the making of the hundreds of parts of an analogue watch by many separated workers with nontransferable specialized tools, “[f]ormerly the individual creation of a craftsman from Nuremberg….” But Silliman isn’t “a craftsman from Nuremberg” in some nostalgic throwback sense of the writer prior to large-scale manufacturing; nor is a sentence analogous to a watch part if that watch stamps temporality with a unified (and universal) measurement. But my speculation on a structural grid of composition for Garfield and argument for a paradigmatic reading evocatively place the text for me in some soberly distant but still salient relation to this theoretical history of reification.

To return to Garfield’s tone: it is one of testing out the expanse of an unruffled, even attention over its world, personal, social, ideological, political. As if the question that each of its sentences posed was the following: What would it be like to live in a sort of “even and soothing” state where no violent disturbances penetrated so deeply as to tear the veil?

From this perspective of testing out a “world tone,” Garfield is to me a somberly and tenderly amusing exercise in trying to control that part of the world the happy-meaning text means to shut out. As it proceeds with its new tone and cadence, it must balance as best it can all that frets at the edges, frays the borders, knocks and fidgets about, itches, bends and twists. But inevitably even the types decay, as the tokens mix.

The text will take heart and inspiration from an undisclosed peer: “Her work is lush and peaceful, measured and textured, as if conflict had never been encountered.” Let’s try to emulate that, with the full admiration it deserves! Yet, in every stanza-paragraph appears only threats — from inside and out — emotional disappointments and alienation, political dead-ends. To mention only one. Garfield is dedicated to a pet cat. Yet only mostly threatening dogs appear in the text (and one cat named Trouble — the text is dedicated to Alto: more token slippage).

Trying to show ease and harmony, the text succeeds at putting up linguistic windows between that other world, which, paradoxically, it fully inhabits, and its own, the way the news gets through, even when most distorted for control by communications media. Yet the news gets through.