The object of this paper is to specify Ted Hughes’s practice of language by studying some of the linguistic means by which his poetry (and prose) organize and produce a discourse of myth. By "discourse of myth" I understand a discourse which refers to an origin or essence rather than to a mode of functioning; one which hides the cultural and historical behind a reference to a nature or essence. Hughes’s writings can be specified, on the one hand, by their theory of language, by the myths of language which they imply and propose; and on the other hand, by the grammars through which they construct their discourse of myth. What interests me primarily is how these grammars enter into relation with a general system of discourse within the corpus of Hughes’s poetry; and, at the same time, the anthropology or theory of human action which they imply, what the critic Kenneth Burke would call their "grammar of motives". The aim is thus a partial account of some specific ways of saying in Hughes’s language.

The language of myth in Hughes is inseparable from the myths of language which underlie his work. Hughes’s poetry is an anthropology, in the sense that it is a poetics of human essence. As such, language is its central problem and paradox. Hughes’s anthropology is constructed against language, towards a redefinition of the human outside of language; yet his critique of language is founded on a reductive conception, which understands language primarily as representation (instrument) rather than activity. In the way they talk about language, i.e. by postulating a human nature or essence independent of language, Hughes’s poems organize their own myth: they purport to be a language about what is beyond language. Some recent discussions of Hughes and language (for example, Paul Bentley’s The Art of Ted Hughes: Language, Illusion, and Reality) are problematic in that they share Hughes’s essential presuppositions about language. This paper is an attempt to displace the critical take on Hughes, to the extent that it seeks to understand his writing as enunciation.

My starting point is a set of suggestions about myth made by Wittgenstein in his "Remarks on Frazer’s Golden Bough" (in Philosophical Occasions). Wittgenstein is interested here in the idea that language is a set of means for producing mythologies (he notes, "An entire mythology is stored within our language" [133]) and proposes, by implication and suggestion, a grammar of myth, that is, an account of the grammatical and rhetorical procedures by which mythological discourses are constructed. Among these can be cited substantialization, personification, metonymy, catachresis. Hughes’s writings may be characterized as mythological in the specific sense in which Wittgenstein uses the notion, according to Jacques Bouveresse in his Wittgenstein: la Rime et la raison. Science, éthique et esthétique. Bouveresse notes: "Wittgenstein clearly inclines to thinking that there is in any explanation which claims to show the origin, the justification, the reason, etc., an element which assimilates it to myth. A myth is produced every time that instead of looking simply at the way things appear in fact in each case, we are led to postulate the presence of one specific element which must provide an account of how they appear in all cases" (212; my translation).

Much of Hughes’s poetic output has been described as "mythopoetic"; but this term has most often been used to refer to texts which explicitly formulate myths, or reformulate myths, such as "Theology" in Wodwo, or the Crow poems. Given that , it seemed useful to me to think about texts which, though they do not aim at producing myths in the sense that they function as a narrative, participate, through their use of language, in mythcal discourse, in the sense in which I am using the term. In posing the problem in this way, I am seeking to displace the study of Hughes’s poetics of myth to the domain of language. Myth in Hughes can be studied as what the linguist Henri Meschonnic calls a "discursive continuum", a particular form of coherence which runs throughout Hughes’s poetic output. This continuity, I will argue, is at the same time a paradoxical form of subjectivity in Hughes’s language.

Predication of essence.

Hughes’s anthropology is organized around a distinction between essence and accident, which seeks to measure language and culture against the primordial. As has long been noted, the poems stage a confrontation with essential or elemental forces in nature, and by implication, with the presence of these forces in the subject. They represent the relation of man to nature or the cosmos in terms of a relation of "participation", of shared substance, which functions similarly to the way relations of part to whole are constructed in what Ernst Cassirer, in his Philosophy of Symbolic Forms calls "mythical thinking": "The whole does not ‘have’ parts and does not break down into them; the part is immediately the whole and functions as such" (49-50).

This notion of participation is clearly enounced, for example, in the early poem "Fallgrief’s Girlfriends" (NSP 9): the character Fallgrief affirms the value of "Any woman born" because she "Has as much of the world as is worth more/ Than wit or lucky looks can make worth more", that is, her worth depends on the simple fact of her "participating" in the substance of the world. Fallgrief’s girlfriend is not a part which, with others, serves to compose the world; she herself "contains" the world. A similar image of participation appears in the poem "The Horses" (NSP 7-8), where the horses of the title are described as "Grey silent fragments//Of a grey silent world." Interesting as well from this point of view is the opening of the poem "Fourth of July" (NSP 27), which begins: "The hot shallows and seas we bring our blood from/ Slowly dwindled". The continuity between "us" and the prehistoric seas is affirmed in terms of a relation of substance, the metaphor of "blood", which serves to define what "we" are. It thus functions by means of a strategy of definition which Kenneth Burke, in his Grammar of Motives, defines as "familial substance", a relation of consubstantiality determined by "ancestral cause" where substance is transferred, for example, from parent to offspring (Burke 26). At the same time, its metaphor of substance corresponds once again to a general tendency which Cassirer notes in what he calls mythical thinking, and which consists in reducing "even intricate complexes of relations […] to a pre-existing material substance" (54-55).

One of the central conceits by which Hughes’s poetry distinguishes between essence and accident is the notion of nakedness, the fiction of a human state (or human essence) "stripped" of language and culture. This notion makes appearances throughout Hughes’s New Selected Poems, from "Fallgrief’s Girlfriends" ("he meant to stand naked/ Awake in the pitchdark where the animal runs") to "Curlews Lift" (Remains of Elmet). Some of Hughes’s poems function as representations of this mythical state "beyond" language, achieved through an identification with the natural world. "Go Fishing" (NSP 255-6) is an invitation to a state of "nakedness", here the result of an experience of immersion or dissolution in the natural environment of the stream; this immersion is tantamount to a destruction of the subject, because it involves "los[ing] words". Similarly, the priest-tree protagonist of "Tree" (NSP 170-1) undergoes an experience of illumination, through which "words [leave] him", such that he appears "Stripped to his root-letter", and thus becomes himself a "language" of nature.

What interests me here are the specific linguistic means by which Hughes’s mythology of essence and accident and its reduction of motives are constructed. Negation is one of the basic linguistic devices by which mythic discourse is produced in Hughes: as in a long established tradition of philosophical and theological speculation, the predication of essence relies on the negation of the capacity of language to define it. This fundamental attitude is exemplified by the use of the expression "the nameless" to refer to the natural world or to its "ground" or essence, as, for example, in the poem "Salmon Eggs" (NSP 256-7). The expression "the nameless" conceives of language as naming or nomination, and thus presupposes a unitary conception of the world, a single meaning or set of meanings given in advance, which the categories of human languages can only repeat, by naming (it treats languages as nomenclatures, sets of labels for an already constituted, ordered reality); and it refers at the same time to the central myth of this conception of language, that of Adam in Genesis naming the animals (Gen 2:19). Hughes’s myth of nature relies on the reduction of language to names, a traditional theological motif.

Throughout Hughes’s poems, essence is defined by means of the negation of accident. Animals are continually defined as a negation of the human, yet are at the same time personified; their implied relation to the human thus affirming a realer, more essential humanity. The animal or natural object is thus the locus of an ethical critique: the hawk of "Hawk Roosting" (NSP 29-30) is characterized by the fact that there is "no sophistry in [its] body"; the thrushes of "Thrushes" (NSP 39-40) by action free from "indolent procrastination" or "yawning stares". Similarly, the otherness of the nonhuman world of sea, stone, and wind described in "Pibroch" (NSP 83) is defined negatively, as "meaningless" and "without purpose, without self-deception". Hughes’s poems often present themselves as an enactment of the stripping away of the accidental; and this stripping away is accomplished by negation, as in a poem like "Speech out of Shadow" (NSP 197-98) where a series of body parts are enumerated and dismissed through the iterated, anaphoric use of "Not" placed at the beginning of each line group, until the poem arrives at its representation of essence, here called "the purpose", and identified as a form of participation in cosmic forces by the appositive noun phrase "the unearthly stone in the sun".

The grammar of participation.

In both of the cited examples, the value of "darkness" is determined by its association with the notion of depth ("deeper in darkness"; "darkness beneath night’s darkness"). One might note here that the conjunction of the metaphors of depth and darkness seems to derive directly from Jung, who writes, in a remark cited by Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts: "The deeper ‘layers’ of the psyche lose their individual uniqueness as they retreat farther and farther into darkness" (Gifford and Roberts 34) In this spatialization of the "psyche", the metaphor of depth functions, in Jung as in Hughes, as an operator of mythical discourse, to the extent that it serves to distinguish essence and accident; individuation and historicity have been relegated to the category of the inessential. Here again the strategy of what Burke calls "familial substance" is at work: the nature or substance of the primordial is assumed to be transmitted to the descendant.

The effect of substantialization is most particularly clear where these semantically negative words function as grammatical subjects. The clausula of "Gog" pivots around a repetition of the word "darkness" in which "darkness" replaces "I" as grammatical subject: "I become darkness.//Darkness that all night sings and circles stamping." (Wodwo). Similarly, in "The Howling of Wolves", "darkness", associated by apposition with the subject of a participial clause, describes the animating principle of the earth in the body of the wolf: "The earth is under its tongue,/ A dead weight of darkness, trying to see through its eyes" (NSP 84). Here again the abstract noun in -ness determines a mythical representation of participation, which makes body and earth one substance, inside and outside consubstantial. As Joanny Moulin notes, Hughes’s poems commonly represent the earth as body (Moulin 60). A poem from Remains of Elmet, "Wadsworth Moor", contains the line: "Earth bleeds her true darkness" (Three Books 53); here the assimilation between earth and body functions as the metaphorical correlate of Hughes’s discourse of participation.

In another early poem already referred to, "The Horses" (NSP 7-8), this relation of participation is constructed "literally", by means of the relation between the abstract noun "stillness" and the adjective "still". The poem opens with an evocation of the "frost-making stillness" where the speaker walks before dawn; the horses are then subsequently described as "megalith still", and two further occurrences of "still" used as adjective and adverb apply to them. The relation of "still" to "stillness" functions thus as an analogue of the relation of the horses to the "grey silent world" of which they are said to be the "fragments".

Paradoxes of negation.

Hughes’s writing works continually with the ambiguity of negative expressions, and this effect of ambiguity is a part of his grammar of myth. Notable here are some paradoxical constructions of the pronoun "nothing". The wind in "Pibroch" is described as "Able to mingle with nothing"; its conjunction with "Able" gives "nothing" an ambiguously positive or negative sense. The noun phrase "the nothing" which appears in "Gnat-Psalm" (NSP 85-6) creates a similar effect. The use of negation in these cases seems to correspond to what Kenneth Burke describes as the "paradox of purity" or "paradox of the absolute", a variant of his "dialectic of substance". Burke notes that the etymology of the word substance suggests, paradoxically, that any definition of substance must be made contextually, that is to say, in terms of something else, in terms of what it is not: the hypokeimenon is what "stands under" something else. The necessity of contextual definition leads to the assertion, put forth variously in such authors as Plotinus and Pseudo-Denys, that the ground of being is non-being. According to Gilson, in the logic of negative theology, God for the sixth century theologian Pseudo-Denys is not being but "beyond being", is thus a "primitive non-being" which is the cause of all (Gilson 83-84; my translation). Similarly, for Hughes, negation functions as the fundamental means of defining substance.

A second aspect of what I am calling "substantialization of the negative" in Hughes’s work is manifested by the nominalization of adjectives of negative meaning. Here the most significant example is the already mentioned noun phrase "the nameless". "Curlews Lift", a poem from Remains of Elmet, closes by describing the Yorkshire landscape as "the nameless and naked" (Three Books 44). (The association and implied equivalence of the adjectives "nameless" and "naked" here is significant: it assimilates language and culture with clothing, and as such ultimately derives from the traditional sign theory metaphor of language as the clothing of thought.) The expression "the nameless" takes on a paradoxical function in the poem, coming after a series of metaphorical statements which describe or name the landscape. Once again, substantialization serves to identify or to create a parallel between part and whole: the curlews are themselves described in terms of "namelessness" and "nakedness", as "Stripped of all but their cry", as reduced to "twists of near inedible sinew"; they appear continuous with the landscape, since they are said to "Lift/ Out of the maternal watery blue lines". The close of the poem, which presents them as "Drinking the nameless and naked/ Through trembling bills", plays upon the contrast between the concrete substance specified by the verb "Drinking" and the abstract nouns which function as its direct object: while "drinking" implies a kind of "transsubstantiation", a direct participation in substance, the categorical dissonance serves to render this substance problematic, mysterious, unknowable.

Poetics of continuity.

Hughes’s writing is characterized by what I would call a "syntax of continuity", involving specific syntactic constructions which affirm the myth of continuity in nature, or between nature and man. The use of "substantialized negation" in Hughes’s poems is accompanied by such effects, which serve to organize Hughes’s grammar of motives, his representation of action and motivation. The paratactic closure of "Pike" makes the word "darkness" the object of a doubly parenthetical construction, appearing first in a relative clause which separates "dream" from its relative clause modifier "That rose slowly towards me", then in the prepositional phrase "beneath night’s darkness", a double embedding which functions as a syntactic analogue of the interiority of the darkness which the poem evokes; moreover, the passage inverses the apparent spatial relation of internal to external darkness, because here the darkness of the night is syntactically embedded in the darkness of the dream; the value of "darkness" is here inseparable from its construction.

Works cited.

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.

Hughes, Ted. New Selected Poems 1957-1994. London: Faber, 1995.

Moulin, Joanny. Ted Hughes. La langue rémunérée. Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Occasions. Cambridge University Press.