The point of puns

Modern Philology

Volumn 96, Issue 4, 1999, Pages 421-437

  Bates, Catherine ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 34248752122     PISSN: 00268232     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/492782     Document Type: Article

References (24)

1. Oxford English Dictionary, 2d ed., s. v "pun. "
2. Walter Redfern, Puns (Oxford, 1984), pp. 16,4.
3. King Lear 1. 2. 6. All references to Shakespeare are to The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans, 2d ed. (Boston, 1997).
4. On the relation between etymology and genealogy as, historically, two intimately related systems of legitimization, see R. Howard Bloch, Etymologies and Genealogies: A Literary Anthropolo of the French Middle Ages (Chicago, 1983).
5. See, e. g., the entry under calembour in E. Littré, Dictionnaire de Ia Ianguefrançaise (Paris, 1863-77).
6. See also Redfern, Puns, p. 17, on this conjectural etymology.
7. See Addison's essay on the history of the pun in The Spectator no. 61 (May 10, 1711), in The Spectator, ed. Donald E Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford, 1965), 1:262.
8. "Preface to Shakespeare," in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson, 16 vols. (New Haven, Conn., 1958-90), 7:74.
9. On the power of the folk etymology to 'undermine the easy mastery of language implied in much of our literary and philosophical tradition and to shake our assurance in fixed and immediately knowable meanings,' see the discussion in Derek Attridge, Peculiar Language: Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce (London, 1988), esp. ch. 4; this quotation, p. 123.
10. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, ed. Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye, trans. Roy Harris (London, 1983), p. 111.
11. Aristotle, Poetics, in The Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols. (Princeton, N. J., 1984), 2:2333-34.
12. As another instance of how the word "pun" seems to attract politicized or corroboratory stories, one could consider the explanation that might be forthcoming to account for the word's first appearance in English. While the OED cites Dryden's play The Wild Gallant (1663) as the first recorded citation, the word has been antedated to a Royalist pamphlet entitled Mercurius Aquaticus published in Oxford on January 18, 1644, during Charles I's sojourn there (see Notes and Queries, 11th ser., no. 1 (1910), p. 425). In the tract, John Taylor (the "Water Poet") defiantly rebuts a puritan charge that the Royalist party indulges in a foppish and courtly language which includes "Quibbles, Crops, Clinches, Puns, Halfe-jests, jests, fine sentences, witty sayings, rare truths, modest and dutiful expressions" (sig. A2, Thomason Tract E29 [11]). Taylor defends the Royalist cause, but in order to do so more effectively he adopts (like his admired Thomas Nashe in the earlier Marprelate controversy) the subversive, populist style of his opponents. One can see how easily the ensuing interplay between subversion and authority (Puritan/Royalist, London/Oxford) might be described as "entirely appropri. ate" to the word "pun," and how tempting it would be to say that the term which specifies a signifier's divided loyalty between two signifieds "fittingly" emerged in English in the 1640s, a period marked by perhaps the most profound political dividedness in the nation's history.
13. In "The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges" (Social Science Information 16 [1977]: 645-68), the anthropologist Pierre Bourdieu argues, by contrast, that polysemy exists within the learned, academic space of the dictionary in a way that it does not exist within practical communication. The multiple meanings that are marshalled side by side within a dictionary are, in practice, separated out and contextualized by speakers and listeners so that utterances can be understood immediately. The important exception to this, however, are those "ideological" puns where polysemy is exploited deliberately: "one can only speak of the different meanings of a word so long as one bears in mind that their juxtaposition in the simultaneity of learned discourse (the page of the dictionary) is a scholarly artifact and that they never exist simultaneously in practice (except in puns)" (p. 648).
14. For a recent discussion of the pun as a point, see Susan Purdie, Comedy: The Mastery of Discourse (London, 1993), p. 40: "Punning⋯ is one particular version of a wider operation in which a cluster of excessive, contradictory significations are evoked, which are all in some way valid, but cannot all be 'properly' fitted at the same time to the signifying event. Thus-although there may not be one particular point which on its own carries specifically doubled signification-the utterance is constructed so that it cannot make sense without holding, across some single point, two understandings which are structurally compatible. "
15. For a discussion of how closely this negative attitude toward the pun was related to Enlightenment attempts to correct and stabilize the language, see Margreta de Grazia, "Homonyms Before and After Lexical Standardization, " Shakespeare Jahrbuch (1990), pp. 143-56.
16. William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3d ed. (Harmondsworth, 1995). This and the following quotation are on pp. 69, 195.
17. Quoted from Jonathan Culler's introductory essay, "The Call of the Phoneme," in On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (Oxford, 1988), p. 4.
18. Howard Felperin, Beyond Deconstru ction: The Uses and Aliuses of Literary Theory (Oxford, 1985), this and the following quotations on pp. 186, 188, 192.
19. Alexander Pope, The Dunciad 4. 199-202, in The Twickenharn Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt, 10 vols. (London, 1961-67).
20. Geoffrey Hartman, Easy Pieces (New York, 1985), pp. 145-50
21. for Umberto Eco's critique of Hartman, see Eco's "Overinterpreting Texts," in Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 45-66.
22. Eco pursues the questions of what it is appropriate to interpret and how far it is appropriate to go in The Limits of Interpretation (Bloomington, md., 1990).
23. John Milton, Paradise Lost, 9. 1067-98, ed. Alastair Fowlcr (London, 1971).
24. William Empson, The Structure of Gomplex Wards (1951; reprint ed., London, 1985), this and the following two quotations p. 66.