Metonymy to Metaphor*

St. Cyril Road and Other Poems by Amit Chaudhuri. New Delhi: Penguin/Viking, 2005. Rs. 200.

I recall wondering where the poet would go from here. The other poem in London Magazine, 'Letter from the Hills,' was also a narrative, in similar long lines of free verse cadenced like prose, and though there were felicitous similes and metaphors embedded in them, it was a form that could easily sink into monotony.

Theory-savvy readers might use David Lodge's schema, derived from the structural linguistics of Roman Jacobson, that accommodates all discourse between two poles--the metaphoric and the metonymic (which is allied to the synecdochic). Prose, especially in the realistic mode, tends to be metonymic, 'forwarded essentially by contiguity,' while poetry, especially in the lyric mode, tends to be metaphoric. But in the oscillation of literary trends, the distinction becomes less than clear-cut: neoclassical poetry leans towards the metonymic and Romantic prose towards the metaphoric pole. In our time the poetry of Larkin deliberately swerves towards metonymy. Not that Larkin doesn't use metaphor, but 'the metaphors are foregrounded against a predominantly metonymic background, which is in turn foregrounded against the background of the (metaphoric) poetic tradition' (Modes of Modern Writing).

This is also true of Chaudhuri's early poems, like the two mentioned above, which make up the 28 pages of Part One of this, his first collection. Alongside these poems Chaudhuri set to work on his first novel, A Strange and Sublime Address, which appeared in 1991. The completion of the novel marked the end of writing 'metonymic' poems. Henceforth Chaudhuri reserved 'metonymic' writing for his prose narratives, where it 'properly' belongs, though here too something of a crossover occurs, for his prose exhibits a poetic, perhaps even precious, quality, with a conspicuous use of metaphors and similes. Chaudhuri acknowledges this in his Preface when he says that 'the prose swallowed up, or at least incorporated the poetry.'

He continued to write poems, but now they were 'sparer and more compressed.' I think they are also closer to the metaphoric pole than the early poems. They make up the bulk of the collection (Parts Two and Three), a good 50 pages or so of varied and frequently evocative poetic notations, sometimes humorous:

. . . . . they tried
it tentatively; the dwarf
like jet of water sprang ceilingward
and surprised their secret regions.
("The Bidet")

Sometimes wistful:

And the old homelovingness
of light falling and touching the black
utensils; the bee-buzz of love,
part song, part nature's reverie.
("Kitchen")

And at least once topically disturbing:

We slept badly; the French windows shook
and she and I woke from a dream, thinking they
had come, and our city was taken.
("The Fall of Baghdad")

I hope we don't have to wait long for Chaudhuri's next collection.

Kaiser Huq teaches English at Dhaka University.

*Note: For the benefit of the casual reader it may be appropriate to define 1) metonymy: (Greek 'name change'), a figure of speech in which the name of an attribute or a thing is substituted for the thing itself, as in 'The Stage' for the theatrical profession; 2) synecdoche: (Greek, 'taking up together), a figure of speech where the part stands for the whole, as in 'give us our daily bread' where bread stands for meals.