Figurativeness figuring as a Condenser between Event and Action

How Tropes Generate Additional Dimensions of Narrativity

Benjamin Biebuyck¹

Ghent University

Over the past decades, narratologists of all kind have criticised the traditional structuralist approach for using a concept of narrative and a set of analytical instruments that are too static to deal with the multitude of complex processes occurring in narrative practices. Many of them – particularly in the context of so-called postclassical narratology ­– have done important efforts to develop concepts and methodologies more fit to trace and interpret the dynamics in narrative.² In this process of renewal, re-thinking the concept of ‘event’ in narrative and its tellability is of vital importance. Inspired by poststructuralist criticism, contemporary narratologists have at the same time paid more attention to what was used to be considered the descriptive repertoire of the narrator – the various tropes appearing in the narrative representation.³ But what remained relatively unnoticed is the idea that tropes unfold an idiosyncratic relation to the narrated events and thus may open up additional dimensions of tellability. The aim of this article is to investigate the narrative potential of figurative forms and to gauge the extent to which broaden the spectre of eventfulness altogether.

Narrative dynamics and paranarrativity

The starting point of this venture is the simple assumption that if it is reasonable to analyse the performative nature of the narrative discourse – the rhetoric of narratology –, then it must be equally plausible to investigate the narrative performance instigated by specific figures of speech or tropes – the narratology of rhetoric. It is our contention that figurativeness – understood as the aggregate of creative or novel tropes occurring within a narrative unit – exerts an important function in the temporal dynamics of the narrative, comparable to the electrical device referred to as a condenser and hence reshuffles the relationship between and the understanding of both action and event. This potential makes it possible that tropes unfold a supplementary dimension of the narrative. In her 1992 monograph on figurative networks in Proust’s prose, Pimentel coined the term ‘paranarrative’ to describe the “narrative dimension” in the “process of metaphorization” (7). For reasons that will be explained later on, we will use this very concept, yet not to refer to isotopic connections between tropes, as Pimentel did, but to denote the additional narrative unfolded by their very eventfulness.

A critical point of reference in this argument is the analysis of narrative texts that do not include a wide range of represented actions, but still display an eminent, be it somewhat vague or indefinable, narrative dynamics. An interesting example of this is the half philosophical, half literary trajectory the 19th century German thinker Friedrich Nietzsche followed. As is well-known, Nietzsche suffered severe disappointment in 1872 after the publication of his monograph Die Geburt der Tragodie, whose ambition it was to reconfigure the ongoing discussion in classical philology as well as in philosophy of culture. The reactions of the critics were mainly repudiative, whereas the general public remained to a large extent silent. Shortly after the publication, Nietzsche held a series of five speeches, posthumously published under the title Ueber die Zukunft der Bildungsanstalten. These speeches were, however, anything but straightforward rhetorical performances. On the contrary: they took the form of a small narrative serial, clearly inspired by the classical dialogue tradition and depicting a poignant encounter the narrative Ego had experienced as a student. Still in the course of the writing process of this text, which was never completed, Nietzsche grew gradually aware that his true vocation was to become a literary writer, a “Schriftsteller”⁴, not so much because he had become uninterested in philosophical reflexion, but rather because he was convinced that there was no other way to rejuvenate philosophy, than by making it literary, i.e. by releasing it from the laboratory vacuum it was supposed to be thriving in and by embedding his own philosophical project in a network of psychological, personal, social and cultural power relations. Conjoining points of interest were the possibility to advance temporality as an intrinsic aspect of the philosophical project, to stimulate processes of signification and to establish alternative relationships with the readers, not addressing them as they are or for what they are supposed to be, but as what they are to become, transformed as they will be by their reading of and their confrontation with the text.⁵ The fundamental importance of this programmatic shift in Nietzsche’s thinking cannot be overestimated. It cannot be but somewhat surprising that the literary experiments he ventured in the two following decades – the Bildungsanstalten, of course, theatrical dialogues and anecdotes in Menschliches, Allzumenschliches (1878-79), Morgenrothe (1881) and Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882) – remain very sparse with respect to the radius of their narrativity. It is tempting to conclude that this sparseness is due to the philosophical undercurrents of this prose; and definitely, it should be related to the literary tradition in which he embedded himself (Goethe, Stifter) and in which the principle of narrative economy was of pre-eminent importance. But as already indicated, despite their clearly dialogic character, the reader senses the narrative dynamics, not only from the intrinsic dialectics of the dialogue, but most prominently from processes of change and transformation inherent to the unfolding narrative discourse itself.

Tropes as narrative events

A good example of this dynamics is his Zarathustra, published between 1883 and 1885 – a strongly idiosyncratic, pre-expressionist quadripartite ‘serial novel’ about a solitary teacher, seeking an audience to which he can reveal his message of perpetual overcoming and eternal return. The structure of this book, with its titular address of both everybody and nobody, is in narratological terms extremely simple. In the prologue and in the fourth and final part, there is some minor interaction with antagonists (the holy man, the tightrope walker, the jester, the gravediggers, the old man in the house, and ultimately the higher men). In between, the extradiegetic narrator restricts his proper contributions to almost ritualistic and connective acts of opening and closing the consecutive speeches of the protagonist. Looking at the scarceness of the reported action, one might consider Nietzsche a poete manque, who has failed to execute his proper ambition to transform his philosophy into literature. But when we look more closely, we can see that the narrator’s speech is manifestly literal, that is: he uses in the opening of the book hardly any marked or creative tropes and restricts the poeticity of his discourse to similes: “einem Possenreisser gleich” (Zarathustra 21), “glich dem Meere, wenn der Sturm hineinfahrt” (Zarathustra 21), “wie ein Seefahrer” (Zarathustra 25), “nicht einer Beute gleich” (Zarathustra 27). Inspired by the intrinsic semiotic ambivalence of the initial situation (the audience waiting for the tightrope walker, Zarathustra eager to proclaim his teaching of the overman), the protagonist in his turn accumulates a vast variety of tropes, chiefly metaphors, dispersed over his speeches. The reading process gradually makes clear that these metaphors do not function as mere ornaments enhancing the intended effect of the rhetorical performance; the narrator pays no attention whatsoever to the effects of the audience in the narrated world, just as little as the protagonist himself. Instead, the reading shows that the metaphors amalgamate around figurative clusters, so that in the end it becomes more plausible to state that they actually tell something about the protagonist’s dramatic becoming, rather than to claim that they are part of the discursive apparatus available to him. They do not tell something, however, about the protagonist as an idiolectal symptom of his inner state of mind – the book is in all respects so provocatively anti-psychological that it sounds nearly heretic to even suspect that the figures of speech demonstrate his psychological background. Instead, the clusters into which the metaphors integrate themselves turn out to be parts of a supplementary dimension of the narrative – one that does not exist autonomously, but attaches itself, as if it were a symbiont, on the primary narrative.

With respect to Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, it is safe to suggest that the narrative impetus, clearly lacking on the level of the primary narrative, has undergone a major transformation, so that out of the scattered, but semantically amalgamating metaphors a derived ‘story’ emerges. This story deals with the very same ‘objects’ or ‘phenomena’ in the depicted reality, but it runs in one way or the other counter vis-a-vis the primary narrative. Admittedly, this specific situation is not the most common one in narrative literature; it serves an end that is not to be detected in the vast majority of narrative texts. Nevertheless, it arouses our interest for forms of narrativity that have remained largely unexplored until now and in which figurativeness plays the key role. It is our contention that this additional dimension of narrativity is present in most texts rich in figurativeness, and not solely in texts in which the essayistic tone creates an action shortage. In order to substantiate this contention, it will be necessary to re-evaluate more general narratological categories such as action and event in the light of a narratology of rhetoric.

As already indicated, figurativeness is here restricted to novel, creative or marked forms of figurative speech. This does not mean that conceptual tropes (in the sense Lakoff and Johnson or Lakoff and Turner discuss them) or lexicalized figurativeness (catachreses) are of no importance. But they do not interfere with the construction of the paranarrative, unless they occur in settings that are revitalized by creative or marked figurativeness.⁶ With marked or creative tropes, we refer to those utterances in texts that deviate from dominant patterns of conceptualization, in which – put differently – local and textual semantics do not conjoin. Their deviation is, though, not to be situated on a semantic level. On the contrary: they occur if and only if the semantic processing proceeds appropriately. Only then, the irreconcilability of two autonomous conceptualization processes comes to the surface, so that the metaphor, the metonymy or the synecdoche occurs. It is important to stress that the occurrence of these tropes does not depend on any interpretive act – as is the case for symbols (additional conceptualizations on the basis of cultural knowledge) and for textual images (additional conceptualizations on the basis of co-textual knowledge) –, but emerges precisely from a linguistically competent processing of textual communication. In one of the final chapters of the fourth book of Zarathustra, the narrator records an existential relapse on behalf of the last pope: “der gute fromme Papst da hat Thranen in den Augen und hat sich ganz wieder auf’s Meer der Schwermuth eingeschifft.” (Zarathustra 379) This is one of the only instances in the text, in which the narrator positions himself deictically vis-a-vis the narrated situation (“da”). It is surely no coincidence that the narrator, manifestly unable to grasp the inner life of the protagonists of his story, embarks on the figurative style when characterizing the old pope. He produces an associative chain of figurativeness, starting with the tears in the eyes of the pope, crossing over the ontological metaphor ‘melancholy is a sea’ and the conjoining verbal metaphor ‘eingeschifft’, which in its turn presupposes a second ontological metaphor – ‘in his state of mind the pope is a traveller’ – and calls to mind that the pope has in actual facts travelled from afar to Zarathustra’s mountain. The question whether or not this speech act contains figurativeness does not depend on an interpretive intervention. On the contrary: it provokes such an intervention exactly on the basis of its figurativeness. At the same time, the speech act does not simply describe something that happens in the narrated world and hence might be taken as something given; it refers to a development in the narrated world in such a manner that it makes a statement and simultaneously declares that very same statement invalid. This short-circuit is the foundation for the deviational character of the metaphors; it makes also clear that the deviation is not susceptible to reader habituation and can thus be labelled irreducible. It may be customary in narrative theory to explicate this kind of figurativeness as part of the descriptive apparatus, by means of which the narrator can depict happenings taking place in the narrated world. Still, utterances such as these urge us to look at the construction of the narrated world in slightly different ways.

The clue with which the narrator refers to his proper relatedness to the narrated world (“da”), even though he remains uninterruptedly outside the frame of narration, shows that his utterance should not be seen as a mere description, but rather as an act of narration. Acts require intentionality and agentiality. Story-telling, regardless of what is being told, can thus be comprehended as a series of acts of narration, intending to construct a narrated world in motion. The agent, however, is not the prerequisite of the action, but rather – as already Nietzsche understood (Genealogy 279) – the result of the narrative action.⁷ This is in line with contemporary approaches to the narrator or the composer as functions of the narrative, rather than anthropomorphic fabrics of story-telling (cf. Fludernik 635). To the extent that the narrative consists of a sequence of narrative acts, it may become clear that the figurative is not an action in itself, but that it rests upon a specific interplay of actions out of which it emerges – something which befalls on the reader, which occurs without intentionality (since it disrupts expectancy) or agent: a narrative event. Evidently, this event is from another order than the ‘object’ or ‘discourse events’, and even from the ‘mediation’ and ‘reception events’, brought to the fore by the Hamburg narratologists.⁸ The trope as a narrative event has no effect on the character, since the character has no access to the trope insofar as it is not part of a communicative interaction between characters. Neither does the trope hit the speaker or the narrating figure. It does indeed affect the reader, but not to the extent that he or she undergoes an ideological or psychological transformation, as is explained in the case of reception events.⁹ Instead, the event occurs on the level of the role the subject assumes on this very moment. In this context, it might be revealing to differentiate the role of the reader from that of the recipient.¹⁰ Taking into consideration the already mentioned philosophical strand that the action determines the agent (and not vice versa), the role the subject assumes during the reading process, when it subjects itself to the flow of textually supplied information and thus adopts a function established by the narrative, can be described as the reader role, whereas the interpretive stance adopted by the subject in order to process the textual information is the role of the recipient. Although there is no doubt that from an empirical perspective the interaction of the subject with the narrative will be characterized by a rapid oscillation between reader and recipient roles, due to any number of interfering factors, it seems plausible to conclude that the eventfulness of the trope consists in the text-produced expulsion of the subject from the reader role into the role of the recipient. In this sense, the actional structure of the narrative is the stage upon which the narrative event appears to the reader. We would hence argue that it is unnecessary to tie this event up with persistent and resultative changes in the relationship between the subject and the world, as is suggested with respect to reception events.¹¹ The essence of this type of event lies in the fact that the subject switches roles, not due to a personal decision or inclination, but as imposed by the narrative.

Correlative profiles and second order action

This is the point at which the concept of the ‘condenser’ arises – and I use the term here not in some psychological, but in a loosely electrical sense. The role switching the subject undergoes as induced by the figurative narrative event goes hand in hand with the accumulation and the subsequent unleashing of interpretive energy, a process characteristic for the recipient role. The trope manifests itself in the ambivalence of its components: portions of the narrative dispersed over the text, constituting the relevant information linked with the two incompatible concepts. These portions of the narrative are, however, not conjured up in an arbitrary fashion. They present themselves in a clearly hierarchical order, determined by three main factors: the place from which they are called forth (does the relevant information have to be traced from the nearby context or rather from a distant area of the narrative?), the perceptibility they derive from the quantity in which they appear in the narrative (e.g. repetitions or variations), and finally the stylistic prominence with which they present themselves. The salience of each and every portion is evidently strictly related to the moment in the narrative at which the trope occurs. These different grades of salience are fundamental for the interpretation of the trope and can be considered as integral parts of their signification. We propose to denote this as the correlative profile of the information relevant for the trope, which is – at least in part – also responsible for the determination of the type of trope occurring (esp. with respect to metonymy and synecdoche). But more importantly, the correlative profile designates the way in which the trope is tentacularly woven into the entire narrative.¹²

A crucial part of this argument is that the different tropes occurring in the course of a narrative sequence do not simply form a series of isolated events. In nearly all narrative texts I have researched the tropes at least to some extent display a tendency to blend into bigger figurative networks. They do so for two reasons. First and foremost, their common eventfulness operates as an important integrator, since they in comparable ways stand out from portions of the narrative articulated ‘literally’. Secondly, the fact that the trope understood as an event explicitly harks back to both preceding and even following portions of text, reinforces the process of figurative amalgamation. At an earlier occasion, we have coined this network appearing to the recipient after the occurrence of the trope a ‘configuration’, since it draws a picture transgressing the borders of the individual trope.¹³ As much as tropes in a narrative are no series of isolated events, the configuration is not a static construction. Given the fact that it reshapes at every instance in the narrative linked to one of the tropes and most manifestly with every new trope, the configuration reshapes and thus exhibits itself as the dynamic counterpart of the narrative act. This process of change on the level of the configuration can be read as the depiction of a second order action in a second order narrative, already referred to as the ‘paranarrative’. This second order action to which figurativeness as a condenser gives cause, is different from the first order action to that extent that it can indeed display intentionality, in the sense that it entails alternative, albeit hypothetical relations of sequentiality and causality between what Meister calls ‘event objects’, but it does not give rise to the construction of a second order agent, a paranarrator or paracomposer.¹⁴ Then it is clearly the recipient who performs or carries out the actions, even though he or she is nothing more than the executor. For the recipient does indeed have to be gifted with an adequate sense or sensibility for figurativeness, but to a large extent he or she is bound by the shape of the configuration and the correlative profiles. In this sense, one might argue that the recipients are the instrument of the paranarrative, since they can by no means apply their interpretive freedom in an arbitrary manner, but are guided by the second order dynamics of change. Furthermore, we must take into consideration that there is not one single narrating ‘voice’ to be detected in the paranarrative; the figurative forms always entail a multiplicity of voices, which makes it implausible to bundle all of these together in one encompassing anthropomorphic ‘composer’- or ‘abstract-author’-gestalt. Hence, it is reasonable to suppose that the figurative induces a type of composerless, autopoetic narration, thematizing exactly those characters, objects and existents populating the primary narrative – or, which may be referred to, in analogy to the paranarrative, as the epinarrative.

This gives rise to a number of additional questions. The first and most urgent of them focuses of course on the interrelations between the epinarrative and the paranarrative. Since they both fall back on the same ‘protagonists’, can there be a direct impetus of the paranarrative onto the epinarrative? As we have argued before, the paranarrative is to be understood as a derivative narrative, a narrative unfolding exclusively next to an already unfolding narrative – autopoetic, but not autonomous or self-sufficient, which implies that it can only function on itself without narrator, because it presupposes the primary order narrator as one being restricted to the primary order narration. In this sense, it seems implausible to expect that the paranarrative actually interferes in the primary narrative; it can be said to cast a new light on it and put things into a different perspective, but these are supplementing actions rather than real interventions. This is why we do not adhere to the definition put forward by Pimentel, who – inspired by Greimas and the groupe µ – sees ‘metaphorization’ strictly as the manipulation of semes (34). For her, the paranarrative is predominantly the unfolding of an ‘extended metaphor’ (29 and 129) along the lines of one of its isotopies. In our alternative view, metaphor does not so much entail a mechanistic procedure of semic conjunction and disjunction, but rather the dynamic confrontation of potentially very distant portions of the narrative. Hence, there is no reason to restrict the scope of the paranarrative to the one of the five narrative isotopies involved in specific metaphoric settings (Pimentel 53). On the contrary: since the unremitting reorganisation of the correlative profiles of the various tropes precisely constitutes the narrative character of the paranarrative, it seems much more plausible to include all possible tropes, and not only those isotopically linked with one another.

A second question deals with the internal consistency of the paranarrative. From the preceding, we may conclude that it has no ornamental or descriptive relation to the primary narration, it is the narrative account of developments taking place on a different level. It is important to stress that the paranarrative should not be confused with narrative layers that are, put in geological terms, superimposed on the primary narratives, such as allegory. It is correct that allegory is one of the most prototypical forms of figurative narration, but it presupposes a reading attitude decoding the manifest story in terms of a parallel latent one. The narrative itself remains largely unchanged, but it is transferred integrally to another, often ethically implicated, dimension of reference.¹⁵ As such, the changes on the allegorical level follow meticulously the changes on the level of the manifest narration, both with respect to causality and temporality – often at the price of rendering the latter one incredible or untrustworthy. The paranarrative, however, being tied to the eventuality of figurative occurrence, has no continuous time-line, but takes on a lapidary form, becoming very prominent at some points of the primary narrative, only to retreat at others. Conjuring up dispersed portions of the narrative and shifting figurative networks, the paranarrative manifestly traverses the intentionality and temporal linearity of the primary order. This urges us to interpret it as a counter-telling, joyously released from the illusion of narrative sequentiality and – although requiring recipient activity – not depending on a specific and purposive hermeneutic intervention, as is required in case of allegory. This is irreconcilable with Pimentel’s view that the paranarrative follows in close and ‘parallel’ (36) interaction the primary narrative, from which it depends directly (50), both in terms of chronology and causality. Being a derivative narrative, the paranarrative is not necessarily the shadow of an epinarrative, since it has the potential to disrupt its most elementary narrative parameters. As such, it is determined to be an answer to the primary narrative, by means of which the literary text can fully unfold its reflexive potential.

Generators of paranarration

But how, then again, do the different parts of the paranarrative actually blend? As already indicated, an important responsibility lies with the recipient as the executor of the figurative instructions, derived from the tropes themselves and from their interrelations. And obviously, every different narrative displays its proper ways of narrating on different levels. In general, however, we can state that particular attention needs to be paid to specific forms of figurativeness functioning as generators of paranarration.

First, it is useful to make the difference between direct, nominal tropes and tropes that may be coined indirect, who fall back on underlying nominal tropes (such as adjectival or verbal metaphors) and hence already call for recipient intervention in order to be worked out in the first place. Verbal metaphors are particularly important for the paranarrative, since they integrate the trope already from themselves into a process of change or transformation.¹⁶

Secondly, some tropes are themselves subject to transformation in the course of the reading process – dynamic tropes, which for instance at the moment of their occurring appear as metonymic, but develop at a later stage in the narrative a metaphoric complexion. We ought to take into consideration that the determination of tropes into the classical rhetorical categories may turn out a risky undertaking, to the extent that this requires the application of logical and ontological distinctions that are in themselves often highly questionable; the interpretation of metaphors, for instance, habitually falls back on metonymic and synecdochic rationales as well.

Thirdly, it is important to consider the embeddedness of the tropes themselves. Frequently, they are part of an encompassing strategy of linguistic typification; whether they occur in a narratorial utterance or in one of the characters’ direct or indirect speech – with all mixed forms imaginable –, influences unmistakably their impact on the paranarrative.

Fourth, we have to observe with specific concentration those tropes that involve perspectival variation. Especially synecdoche and metonymy display a change in the way the narrated world is looked at and hence contribute hugely to the dynamics of the paranarrative.

The fifth important generator of paranarration is the unfolding of a particular figurative utterance, which by doing so evolves into a larger narrative whole with a clearly discernible thematic and temporal consistency.¹⁷ In this manner, the trope is evidently incorporated into a (micro)narrative process, which displays a conclusive degree of self-sufficiency, even though it is an integral part of the overall narrative. It illustrates, on a smaller scale, the mobility of the articulated tropes and can indeed function as ‘crossover’ to actual paranarrative networks.

And finally, there is the vast category of pseudo-tropes, utterances creating the illusion that tropes are coming into being. Although they are not (always) tropes themselves, they play a key role in the activation of the paranarrative, because they simulate to show how tropes are being coined and hence introduce images of inchoativity in the paranarrative, particularly when complementary tropes occur elsewhere in the narrative. There are many sorts of such ‘pseudo-tropes’, into which to my knowledge hardly any research has been done so far.¹⁸ Some of them may be called embryonic tropes (in ‘as if’-constructions; ‘remind’: ‘his melancholy reminded him of the sea’), metamorphic tropes (‘turn into’, ‘appear to be’, ‘look as if’: ‘his melancholy turned into a sea’), perlocutionary tropes (‘be called’ or ‘named’: ‘he called his melancholy a sea’) or apophatic tropes (‘is not’: ‘his melancholy is not a sea’). However meaningful each and every trope may be in its own terms, it is of crucial importance to notice that it unremittingly repositions itself in what may be called the ‘power relations’ within the dynamic configuration.

Here, we touch upon the heart of the paranarrative. Individual tropes or clusters of tropes each have a different impact in the process of reconfiguration and constitute as such the narrative aspect of paranarration. In every paranarrative, some of them come to the fore with particular force; we have suggested referring to such tropes as the master-trope.¹⁹ This position is not a static one, it indicates in the first place the orientation of the paranarrative at this particular point – an orientation that can be overruled or reinforced at other points. Serving as a figurative attractor, the master-trope has a particular effect on both the non-figurative and the figurative utterances in the narrative, and is in many cases responsible for the change in what we have just called ‘dynamic tropes’. At the end of the day, it seems safe to state that the dynamics of the paranarrative rely on the constant negotiation and re-negotiation within the figurative network for the position of the master-trope. We can assume that isotopies, haptotopies²⁰ and isotropies²¹ function as basic connectors within the configuration, but it is totally unsure whether or not it is possible or even conceivable to design some kind of paranarrative syntax which transgresses the appearance of each individual narrative.

Conclusion

Let us go back now to our starting point: a narrative without much epic development in the traditional sense of the word, but still heavily relying on both philosophical and literary concepts of change and transformation – Nietzsche’s pre-expressionistic novel Also sprach Zarathustra. It is indeed strange that the protagonist, partisan of the liberation of the body, nowhere in the narrative comes close to any of the other characters; even stronger: not at one point he gets near to having a sustained meaningful exchange with other characters – sensitive to their naivety and their ruses, but never seeming to be able to really get at them. The paranarrative, however, circling around metaphors of pregnancy and birth, tells a totally different story, with a protagonist who, yearning to be a father, a mother and their child at once, in the third part of the book undergoes a process of ‘Genesung’, which entails not only healing (as the epinarrative shows), but also delivery (Zarathustra 270). This observation might indeed tempt us to suspect that the paranarrative, unfolding a complementary dimension vis-a-vis traditional narration, is a typical compensatory characteristic of texts with a poor event ratio, in which the underdetermination on a ‘lower’ narrative order is supplanted by a dynamics on a ‘higher’ level. This is surely the case in some texts. But in other texts – and a telling example would be Wilhelm Raabes 1864 clear-cut realistic novella Keltische Knochen – a similar process can be observed, although there is much more of an equilibrium between first and second order actions. Most importantly, in all of the cases the paranarrative is there to enhance and intensify reader involvement, not allowing him or her to remain a witness of what is being represented, but urging them to become an active participant in the encompassing cultural dynamics of the narrative, which does not satisfy itself with mere representation, but always supplements this with a figurative counternarration. In this manner, readers become part of the constant struggle of language with itself.

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