Ways of Reading Third Edition - Martin Montgomery, Alan Durant, Nigel Fabb, Tom Furniss, Sara Mills 2007

12.1 Verbal (and poetic) juxtaposition
Unit 12 Juxtaposition
Section 3 Attributing meaning

Juxtaposition may be defined simply as the placing of elements side by side. In communication the juxtaposition of meaningful elements is both a routine and essential practice in the composition of messages - literary or otherwise. Sentence construction, for instance, relies upon observing close constraints in the way words are put together and significant alterations in meaning can result from simple changes in the ordering or placement of items in a sentence.

The term juxtaposition, however, can also refer to a rhetorical technique that goes beyond the simple placement of communicative elements side by side. In this more specialized sense, juxtaposition can be defined as:

combining together two or more communicative elements in ways that emphasize the discontinuities or differences between them, thereby provoking some surprise or puzzlement at their close placement.

Some simple principles of juxtaposition can be illustrated at work in the following translations of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Japanese haiku:

Haiku 1

Harvest moon:

On the bamboo mat

Pine tree shadows.

Haiku 2

Wooden gate,

Lock firmly bolted:

Winter moon.

Each poem consists of three short lines, and in both cases the sense of the poem seems to rest on three separate elements - ’moon’, mat’ and ’shadows’ in one; ’gate’, ’lock’ and ’moon’ in the other. These elements are juxtaposed in such a way that the links between them are not very obvious. Neither of the poems, for instance, consists of a fully formed sentences and so the reader is required to make an interpretive effort to fill in the gaps and spell out the connections between the main elements. This effort is accentuated by the division of each poem into two sections around a major punctuation mark - a colon. In each case there is only an implicit connection between the elements on either side of the colon. Although it is possible to see a causal relation between a harvest moon and pine tree shadows, the lack of explicit connections forces the reader to make an inferential leap. The connection between a locked wooden gate and a winter moon demands greater interpretive effort. In each poem an element from nature has been juxtaposed with an element from culture - the moon with a bamboo mat, or the moon with a bolted gate - thus creating a tension in each poem between its first and second part. Haiku poems typically revolve around a tension or puzzle produced by juxtaposing (without further explanation) a natural phenomenon with an event or object more closely related to the human world. This can be seen in two further examples:

Haiku 3

Spring rain:

Soaking on the roof

A child’s rag ball.

Haiku 4

Overnight

My razor rusted -

The May rains.

Like the earlier examples, these poems require the reader to supply the unstated connection between their elements. They could be taken as implying repectively:

A child’s rag ball was soaking on the roof because of the spring rain

Overnight my razor rusted because of the May rains

However, these kinds of explicit statements fail to do justice to the possibilities of the original texts. By leaving the precise relations between elements unstated, the communicative possibilities of these short poems are increased; the very disparity of the elements that have been juxtaposed generates - in the absence of explicit connections - a kind of communicative charge.

The poems are translations from Japanese texts of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but similar techniques can be identified in more contemporary Western poetry. The following poem by Ezra Pound could be seen as influenced by the haiku form:

L’ART, 1910

Green arsenic smeared on an egg-white cloth,

Crushed strawberries! Come let us feast our eyes.

Here we find the startling juxtaposition of something toxic (arsenic) with something delectable (strawberries), and something green with something red. Simultaneously, things more normally defined by taste and toxicity are transformed into a publicly visual experience (’Come let us feast our eyes’). And note of course that the title makes these juxtaposed elements emblematic of a historically defined movement. At the core of the poem, however, is a pattern of juxtaposition not dissimilar to haiku. Indeed, the associations are deliberate: ’L’ART, 1910’ was written when Pound was a leading figure in the ’Imagist’ movement (roughly 1910-20), in which a group of writers in Britain and the United States attempted to develop a new form of poetry that was strongly influenced by haiku (especially its use of stark, unexplained juxtaposition). This new form of poetry can be seen as an early example of modernism - a period (1910-40) of experimentation in all the arts in which the juxtaposition of startlingly different elements was a characteristic technique. Much of T.S. Eliot’s poetry (such as The Waste Land, 1922) juxtaposes a wide range of different kinds of linguistic material (quotations from Wagner’s operas, biblical language, diaries, language heard in a public house, etc.). However, although juxtaposition was particularly common in the verbal and visual arts of the first half of the twentieth century, it is not confined to them; it may be found in texts (literary and non-literary) from many periods and cultures (as witness, for instance, the haiku discussed above). The technique of juxtaposition may be seen to underpin the following two examples from the contemporary Scottish poet, Alan Spence:

mouse tracks

across the frozen lard

in the frying pan

remembering

my father’s death -

cold november rain

          (from Five Haiku, 1986)

Juxtaposition is also used to startling effect in the following poem by Margaret Atwood (1971):

You fit into Me

you fit into me

like a hook into an eye

a fish hook

an open eye