Poetry: Wonders of Words and Words of Wonder

Dedicated to considering the theory of juxtology as an account of randomness, coincidence, and identity

Juxtology: Introduction with Definition
 
I coined the word juxtology in the 1980s and published my first essay on the topic in the late 80s in a collection edited by Jonathan Culler on puns. The term was immediately useful to me in my teaching for conversations not only about books like Joyce's Ulysses but also about the poetry of Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton. Over the past two decades, as I have read and taught this poetry and continued to write about it, I have become increasingly persuaded that the term and its implications are very useful for interpreting late Medieval and Renaissance English poetry. Here are writers who not only juxtapose, they also make of juxtaposition an epistemology, as, for example, in Chaucer's "by his contrary is everything declared." And in my book Shakespeare's Theater of Likeness, I demonstrate how Shakespeare uses this utterly simple but also utterly indispensable word, like, to dramatize the crisis of self-knowledge and self-coincidence, in which, to paraphrase Catherine in Henry V, if we "do not know what is 'like me'," we do not know who we are. Just so, today, in one of the most revolutionary discoveries of brain science yet, we have learned that there are mirror neurons by means of which we feel what others feel and therefore how to feel each of us himself or herself — as if we had found the neural basis of ancient homeopathy.

 
Theater and Theory

      “Theater” derives from Greek thea, which means “viewing, seeing, a sight.” The theater is where the example and the likeness are seen. Theater is the sight as well as the site of likenesses, one important reason like occurs nearly 2,400 times in the canon of Shakespeare’s writings: theater shows you what something or someone is like. Theater thus shows you a theory of that likeness — “theory” derives from the same Greek word, thea, having the sense of “that which is contemplated.” Theater is a theory of how it happened. Theory is a theater of how it might happen or might have happened. Thus, obviously, all theater is theoretical and all theory is theatrical. We could do with a word like, say, “theatrist.” Be that as it may, Shakespeare’s theater of likeness is also a theory of likeness.

     That theory of likeness, assuming exemplariness, is inseparable in Shakespeare’s mind (and body, as well, I think) from the primordial datum in human being of sexual division. We are all copyists because we are all divided and, as divided, incomplete, divided first from our mothers at birth and then from each other throughout our lives — by competition, envy, hatred, spite, and love and sex, too (no sex without division, even in masturbation). We are, in fact, so constituted physiologically that copying is inescapable: we can only take our likeness from another, skin to skin. The first other from whom we take our likeness is our mother. ... Where feminism over the past 30 years has so often seen Shakespeare the misogynist and misogamist, I see Shakespeare the hater of sexual division as such, the man who could imagine (but never attain?) the condition in which

Either was the other’s mine.
Property was thus appalled
That the self was not the same.
Single nature’s double name
Neither two nor one was called.
Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together
To themselves, yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded
That it cried “How true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!
Love hath reason, reason none,
If what parts can so remain.”
“The Phoenix and the Turtle,” lines 36-48

... what torments [Shakespeare] is division itself — I am here, you are there; I am not, unless you are; why must this be so?

Excerpted from Shakespeare’s Theater of Likeness (Washington, DC, 2006)