‘Falling Awake’: Peter Manson’s Catachresis

One of the key tropes of Peter Manson’s work is the deliberately misleading, decontextualised, and downright erroneous use of words, which this article seeks to categorise under the rhetorical trope of catachresis or abusio, misuse. The traditional rhetorical distinction holds that catachresis is only used when there is no adequate term for what one wishes to describe, and that if the term does exist, it is metaphor. However, the Roman rhetorician Quintilian admits (reluctantly and without offering up examples) that ‘poets are accustomed’ to breaking this rule and using catachresis for other reasons, as it seems they have always done. A productively catachresis-centred poetics like that practiced by many avant-garde poets leading up to Manson sees the misuse of words not as a kind of ‘irresponsibility’ with regard to meaning, but as a responsibility to make fresh use of the language. Catachreses in Manson range from as simple a formulation as ‘falling awake’ (clear ‘mis’-application of a term in a way which cannot properly be described as metaphorical) to a more fundamental reconfiguration of a text’s grammar. This article aims first to identify and categorise catachresis in Manson’s recent work along the boundary lines drawn by ancient and contemporary rhetoricians and theorists, and then to explain how that informs our reading of these poems. The reading takes as a starting point the productive wrongnesses that come out of the neo-Oulipian texts of Factitious Airs (2016), then moves to consider catachresis as one possible reference for the idea of ‘frank rupture’ (a deliberate breaking with the conventional meanings of words) in the longer texts of Poems of Frank Rupture (2014). Taking Gertrude Stein's poetics as a point of comparison, the article considers the notion of catachrestic grammar, and how this can develop over a longer text, as well as catachresis as traditionally considered at the level of the individual word. Ultimately it hopes to provide a new critical tool for thinking about those manoeuvres in Manson’s work which cannot be described in the conventional vocabulary of poetic imagery.

For the poets are in the habit of (catachrestically) preferring to use nearby words even for those things which have their own names, which is rare in prose.
-Quintilian 1 One of the key tropes of Peter Manson's poetry is the deliberately misleading, decontextualised, and downright erroneous use of words, which this paper seeks to categorise under the rhetorical trope of catachresis. Much rhetorical terminology is deployed with the intention of describing how a text persuades and communicates, but when considering a poetic text which is not trying to do these things, the same trope takes on a new set of functions. A word recognised as the wrong one displaces obvious referential meanings and suggests new possibilities, but does not determine them. Poems that ' design in' this productive wrongness make catachresis a part of their aesthetic; I want to consider here how we can apprehend this aesthetic and use it to enhance our understanding of the unique capacities of poetry in this mode.
The traditional rhetorical distinction holds that catachresis is only used when there is no adequate term for what one wishes to describe, and that if the term does exist, it is metaphor. However, the first-century Roman rhetorician Quintilian admits (reluctantly and without offering up any examples) that 'the poets are in the habit of' (soleo, 'I am accustomed to') breaking this rule and using catachresis for other reasons, as it seems they have always done. The De Verborum Significatu of Sextus Pompeius Festus records that: 'We use the trope of catachresis, misuse, when we use another word as if it were a right word, because the right word is lacking.' 2 This second-century dictionary, unlike Quintilian, explicitly connects the Greek catachresis with the Latin abusio, allowing us to make the same equivalence in the translation from Quintilian above. The English rhetorician George Puttenham writes in his The Arte of English Poesie (1589) that catachresis is when a word 'neither natural nor proper' is applied where a suitable word is lacking, 'it is not then spoken by this figure metaphor […] but by plain abuse'. 3 This has two main elements in common with Quintilian: defining catachresis against metaphor, and the idea of catachresis as ab-/mis-use of words. Firstly: as Frank Whigham and Wayne Rebhorn point out, Puttenham prefers to describe metaphor not, like most Renaissance rhetoricians, as 'translation', but as 'inversion' in the sense of transposing; there is already a sense with metaphor that language in its 'natural' state is being perverted when turned to this use. Despite the modern acknowledgement that metaphor is ubiquitous in all registers of language, and indeed essential in terms of making meaning, Puttenham still classifies it as ' ornament'. Secondly: the persistence of the term ' abuse', and its slippage from the term 'misuse', can be deceiving, but Puttenham describes it as if it is an ethical failing, as if the words are somehow damaged by being ' abused'. This is notably not the case in Puttenham's chapter on decorum, where he relates the story of an ambassador who misspeaks and thereby causes an international incident and loses his position, ' and all this inconvenience grew by misuse of one word'. 4 But the risks such of 'misuse' when language is being used for communication are rather virtues in experimental poetry, where the 'perversion' of meaning, and the demonstration that it is not 'natural', is the main draw for our aesthetic attention. 5 A productively catachresis-centred poetics like that practiced by many avantgarde poets leading up to Manson sees the misuse of words not as a kind of 'irresponsibility' with regard to meaning, but as a responsibility to make fresh use of the language. The conventional vocabulary of poetic imagery lacks the terminology for talking about the strategies of meaning that are being used in these poems. It is not enough merely to split them into tenor and vehicle of metaphors; they are instead (purposely) ill-chosen referents. In this reading of Manson, we shall see some of the functions of these inadequate choices and, it is hoped, lay the groundwork for a wider examination of catachrestic poetics.

Restrained to Wrongness: Factitious Airs
Catachresis, like certain other atypical uses of language, is employed more readily in texts operating under certain constraints. When only certain words and arrangements are available but something like a meaning is still desired, catachresis becomes necessary not because the proper word does not exist, but because in order to keep to the constraint the poem must use the 'nearest' instead. However, this approximation often ends up driving the very innovations that characterise Manson's poetics.
In his pamphlet of short lyrics and occasional poems Factitious Airs, there are a number of lipogrammatic odes, where the poem only uses those letters which appear in the name of the person to whom it is addressed.
Take this pair of lines from 'Geraldine Monk', dedicated to the poet Geraldine Monk: Eliding a lingam a gladdened idler dreamed a germinal ode in a remade, leaner lingo. 6 The use of 'lingam' here is a perfect example of a catachresis, albeit one combined with a synecdoche. A lingam is an icon used in the worship of the god Shiva, often taking the form of a phallus. It is worth noting that almost no English word for that genital organ can be spelled using only the letters in the name 'Geraldine Monk', but the constraint in fact leads us to a more important factor in the choice, namely that what is being referred to is not the organ but rather the phallus, in psychoanalytic terms the locus of paternal, masculine power. And since a lingam is not a penis but a phallus, it is a closer choice than almost any word other than phallus itself -that is, until we consider the context of the lingam, which is most often paired with its counterpart, the yoni. In the Western psychoanalytic and philosophical traditions there is no 'feminine' counterpart to the phallus, which is why philosophers have tried to abolish it or else invent one, but the closest they have come to a 'yoni-logocentric' discourse is the écriture féminine of Hélène Cixous, among others -which for the poem has been 'ruined' by the constraint. The next line is the puzzler, and the catachresis, but not the kind we're used to -here, we have a deliberate misspelling, because there is no 'y' available. Instead, there is a kind of anti-rhyme ('hidden rime') matching the first consonant of each final word. These pushes towards neologism are not solely motivated by the constraint -'poem' would be permitted, but the less obvious 'verse' and 'paean' appear instead. There are many reasons to avoid using the obvious word for something, but the constraint often functions best as a way of setting the tone for the text to seek refuge in the non-obvious, as in the final line. With no 'g', the lipogrammatic poem cannot say, for instance, 'get married', the verb 'get' disappears; with no ' c' or 'l' can't say 'love each other'. The versatile possibilities of the verb disappear and the 'b' in 'Robin' supplies the copula: 'Be a duo, Eros advises'. 8 There are a few more catachreses worth dwelling on in Factitious Airs, particularly the untitled poem which begins 'falling awake'. 9 This first line shares its initials with the title of the pamphlet and encodes a self-effacing in-joke about the insubstantial ' airs' of its contents being (constituting) 'sweet FA'. The most obvious reading of 'falling awake' is as a catachresis for 'waking up' but, like many phrasal catachreses, it suggests a particular meaning of its own that it cannot ' denote' as such because of its lack of usage history. 10 Without an explicit definition, this is linked with the phrase 'the path of speech' later in the poem, a catachrestic definition of the throatnot truly wrong, as it would be for instance to call it 'the path of Christmas', but not a pre-existing English idiom, as far as I have been able to discover. When we say 'falling awake' for 'waking up' or 'the path of speech' for the throat, we are drawing attention to a particular aspect of these (bodily, everyday) experiences: the disconcerting or unsatisfying nature of certain experiences of waking, or the difficult, distanced, travelled nature of some experiences of speech. This is a metapoetic gesture -that sense of travelled-ness, the need for and history of language's travelling over a great distance of effort, is what I understand Manson's poetic rhetoric to reproduce and show.

Manson's Rhetoric: 'The Baffle Stage'
To speak accurately about catachresis, we should situate it among the work that rhetoric does in Manson's work more generally. The earlier Adjunct: An Undigest Puttenham refers to it as epanalepsis, the Slow Return, or the Echo Sound, and gives the example of a comment recorded by Macrobius about Julius Caesar: 'Fear many must he needs, whom many fear.' 12 Manson's use, however, is slightly more intricate, because the role of the word has changed. Rather than simply repeating a verb, here we have 'fed' at the beginning of the line and 'fed on', and the end, although the ' on' has been displaced to achieve the ' encircling' effect. This draws attention to the word 'fed' as part of a cyclical process, and thus inaugurates the poem's ongoing concern with eating and digestion: 'you eat the poor twice'; 13 ' acid free free luncheon in reverse'; 14 'tapeworm munching'. 15 One instance of this is of particular interest as writes about war in symbolic, rhetorical, comparative terms which can be applied forwards as well as back. Events in the past can be ' divined' by the reader from a densely allusive rhetoric -it is retro-prophetic. By contrast, we can consider Tom Betteridge's description of Manson's 'poetics of candour', which 'must recognise the enclosing logic of the will to direct communication in poetry, in which "writer" and "reader" are consolidated in the false assertion of a dialogic relationship'. 19 That ' candour' might more expansively be called confidence -Manson/the poet/the poem takes the reader into his/its confidence, accommodates it with a level of familiar communication that allows for everything from deadpan humour to discussions of bowel movements. However, this is only possible through a 'false assertion' -which is to say, a purposely inadequate description -' of a dialogic relationship'. To posit a reader-writer relationship that one knows is unrealistic, whether sybil-querent or friend-confidant, is catachrestic, and its clear inappropriateness highlights the need for a new order of linguistic (and thus social) relations.
This catachresis is also present in that doubly personalised personification where descriptions are applied to 'the poem' which are not literally possible, and apply more appropriately to 'the poet'. This stems from an uneasiness with the role of ' author', but also a candour about being forced to occupy it. A critic will say that 'the poem does this' with no irony, but only Manson writes that 'the poem's father died when it was one/the poem was acquiring language then'. 20 This particular catachresis, where the speaker synecdochically erases himself with a sly shift of category from poet to poem, is thus a tongue-in-cheek play on the grammar of criticism.
The grammatical is the next jump Manson's rhetorical strategy makes: from lexis to organising principle.

Grammatical Catachresis: From Gertrude Stein to 'Sourdough Mutation'
Let us now move on to an expansion of the term ' catachresis' from rhetorical descriptor to aesthetic category in poetry, and to consider how catachresis works at the level of grammar, syntax, and structure in still broader senses. What we have discussed so far is catachresis as Quintilian and Puttenham conceive of it: it is a trope that applies to the use of an individual word or a phrase. In these cases, reference is, while not straightforward, at least given a starting point from which to work outward and establish more connections of meaning. In order to see how catachresis works on a grander scale, we will refer back to another writer, the prototype of modernist experiments with error-as-rhetoric: Gertrude Stein.
At first, there might seem to be obvious difficulties in establishing a dialogue between rhetoric and a poetry which is decidedly not participating in information transfer. This goes for Stein just as much as Manson, and indeed is central to most criticism of her work. Critics either look for coded meanings, as in William Gass' 'Gertrude Stein and the Geography of the Sentence', or comment upon the lack of conventional communication altogether, as with Ulla Dydo's view of the reading of Stein as using words ' as things rather than signs'. 21 The most fruitful critical avenues, however, reframe the question, so that it is no longer 'What is Stein saying?' There is a clear grammatical mismatch here -a grammatical catachresis -whose operation will be expanded below, but for illustration of the principle, compare these lines from Stein's 'Arthur A Grammar': Very grammatical.
How many do go.
Heard how many have gone.
While buttoned done.
Made maidenly. 26 This portion of text is not going to yield up an orthodox grammatical sentence; it could not be diagrammed. Stein's fondness for sentence diagrams is well-documented, but she also, as Kirsch observes, knows that there is more to knowing how to write than a robust understanding of the rules of grammar. 'In short any child thirteen years old properly taught can by that time have learned everything about English grammar. So why make a fuss about it. However, one does'. 27 In the classroom where sentence diagrams rule the discourse, these would be classified as fragments.
They most often look like they have aimed at grammar, or sense, and missed -'buttoned done' is almost buttoned down, and there is a chain of similarities: go becomes gone, gone becomes done. The same goes for repetitions -of the 'may' sound and 'how many'. Rather than continually naturalising a meaning as we read, we navigate through the text one connection at a time, with no over-arching semantic meaning to guide us and confirm that our interpretations are correct.
In 'Sourdough Mutation', however, the (unmarked) question is asked, 'is all land property', and another question, which we are to understand uses the same verb, follows. From the point of view of the verb's omissibility, this apposition should be fine; if it were 'is every land property, every fence theft?' this would present no problem.
But in order to be parsed, 'is' needs to change to ' are' in the second question, but no ' are' is to be found. We are then left with a stranded sentence fragment, made the more difficult by the use of 'to fence' as a verb -to get rid of a stolen item by selling it, which would give an alternative sense of ' everything sells on what it has stolen', or something like this. This cannot be the primary meaning, because the pattern established by the paired ' all's is too prominent; nevertheless, the grammatical incompleteness or wrongness, not necessary to produce either meaning, is necessary to create a germination of multiple meanings. By foregoing correctness/accuracy, the possibilities of what the reader may make of the text are expanded.
A little later in 'Sourdough Mutation' we find a potential Stein allusion, which is also a return to the metapoetic. It offers the following self-describing catachresis: know how to pick names semantic disorder red roses o yes 28 Knowing 'how to pick names', but persisting in a semantically disordered manner, is a functional definition of catachresis. Another example of Stein's grammatical catachresis is her famous 'Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose', which first appears as a line in the poem 'Sacred Emily' -we have to continually re-parse (reassess the grammatical status of) each instantiation of 'rose' in order to continue reading the chain. 29 We can pick names, just as we pick roses, as expertly as we please, but the order/disorder in which they are assembled is what gives either meaning or gleeful (' o yes') jouissant unmeaning.

Conclusion: What Use Is Rhetoric?
Catachresis, as I have used the term here, is primarily a rhetorical trope, but this is not to discount the use of the term elsewhere. We have established that the primary project of this poetry is not communicative as such, and yet we have also seen how it is internally structured by what looks a great deal like rhetoric and can be described using its elaborate terminology. In reading innovative poetry, to speak of 'rhetoric' is itself catachrestical: it is merely the nearest word available to describe the organising principles at work.
Manson's poetry deals generally with the inadequacy of language for particular purposes and what can be done about it, and so trying to think about it critically brings similar problems. To go back to the end of the first stanza of 'Irie' once more: 'verbs are pish, nouns are a pushover,/adverbs are pure mad'. 30 This is what Quintilian attributes to a quaint ' custom' of poets but which I see as an essential element of the practice of this poetry: always choosing the word that is close (vicinis) but no cigar, in order to avoid some of the stifling linguistic authority (' oppressive breathing') which comes with the 'right' choices.