Juxtaposing text

Juxtaposition happens in all texts, but sometimes the lack of continuity is
more extreme than usual.
At its purest (in a translated oriental poem, perhaps) we might be offered
2 one-word sentences. Assumptions readers might make to connect the words include

• Equality (or analogy)


• Opposition (disjoint options)


• Sequence (temporal - perhaps one turns into the other)

When we come to a fracture in a longer text (between paragraphs, chapters,
etc) we still try to make a connection
between the parts. The way we do this will vary according to
the type of text we're reading, but typically I suspect we first
assume that the text is jumping ahead in time, leaving a gap that will
be filled in later. Then
perhaps we might think it's a flashback, or a parallel storyline that
will be revisited. Only as a last resort do we concede that there
may be no causal connection or character continuity.

One of the features of conventional text is that writers have to present
things sequentially even if they happen simultaneously or independently.
In such situations where narrative breaks down,
the terms Montage and Collage become useful.
Both describe a non-hierarchical way of incorporating diverse fragments
producing a multicentred work.
Montage more
often concerns assembly using things that have already been "created".
Collage is
more often used when material of different types is used together and when
there's no particular common theme.
Gregory Ulmer described collage as "the single most revolutionary formal
innovation in artistic representation to occur in our century". This may be
because it cuts across the long-cherished Aristotelian notion of organic unity,
where each component of a work is a necessary part of a whole. Max Ernst
claimed that "Collage is a hypersensitive and rigorously exact instrument,
a seismograph capable of registering the exact potentialities of human welfare
in every epoch".

In relation
to poetry, David Antin remarked "for better or worse, 'modern' poetry in
English has been committed to a principle of collage from the outset".
With collage in particular,
use is made of the difference between the source/material of the fragment
and the meaning in the context of the whole - the observer is expected
to bob up and down between surface and depth. Flexibility along
this dimension is more characteristic of poetry reading than prose reading.

There are likely to be connections between
parts, but they may be more to do with surface than meaning - leitmotifs
without a plot. In "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" there's a
common theme. In "The Waste Land" the links are more tenuous. In other works
fragments are only related in that they each mention a red dress, or
an accordian, or have someone shouting "Damn".
These latter relationships can seem gratuitious, leading to "washing line"
pieces (where the only point of the connection is to have somewhere to
hang the pieces from)
but this is to devalue the surface, which in collage is more relevant
than usual. Also such connections make the lack of causal connection
more palatable. Sometimes there are traces of a narrative thread in
a few of the fragments. There's no narrative impetus or suspense though.
Some consider "thematic interplay" the poor man's "conflict and dynamism",
a "compare and contrast" task that requires too much from the reader
and masks the authorial persona.

The idea of a decentralised network of ideas has been described by
Deleuze and Guattari ('rhizomes') but of course goes back much further
than that, beyond Wittgenstein's "family resemblances" -
"The governing principle of much Persian poetry is
circular rather than linear; rather than a logically
sequential progression, a poem is seen as a collection of
stanzas interlinked by symbol and image - the links being
patterns of likeness and unlikeness, of repetition and
variation - which 'hover', as it were, around an unspoken
centre" (Glyn Pursglove, Acumen 25, p.9). Parataxis replaces syntaxis - "the dethronement of language and logic forms part of an essentially
mystical attitude towards the basis of reality as being too complex and at
the same time too unified, too much of one piece, to be validly expressed by
the analytical means of orderly syntax and conceptual thought" (Martin
Esslin, "The Theatre of the Absurd", 1962.)

On a small scale, juxtaposing can happen on a line and
can be read as an implicit (though perhaps surreal) simile.
"In Surrealist metaphor, two terms are juxtaposed so as to create a third which is more strangely potent than the sum of the parts ... The third term forces an equality of attention onto the originating terms", "Statutes of Liberty" (Geoff Ward, Macmillan, 1993, p. 73-74).

On a
larger scale, sentences can come
alternately from 2 fields - in 'The naming of parts' for example, the
reported speech and internal thought alternate. 'Moby Dick' and
'USA' (Dos Passos) inserted non-fictional fragments. Found text can be
inserted randomly into a poem, or fragments of different kinds of
poems (rhymed and free-form) can be interspliced using a variation
of Burroughs' cut-ups technique. Bakhtin's carnival and polymorphism can
come into play too.

See Also

• Collage and post-collage (Pierre Joris)


• The Collage Poetry Mail Group - from the International Museum of Collage, Assemblage and Construction (IMCAC)