Excerpts from
Patricia Eakins, Linguae Regeneratrix, or Hybrid Onomatopoeias

Françoise Palleau-Papin
Université de Paris III (Nouvelle Sorbonne), France



Patricia Eakins's prose seems to be made for reading out loud, as in the ancient tradition of a story-teller who brings forth the power of enchantment of his words by the sheer pleasure of mouthing the sounds of his language to an audience of eager ears. InPierre, the slaves meet around a fire at night and listen to the stories told by Squint, and this may be a clue to how to read the stories of the "Hungry Girls" collection. The sounds of words are used in such a way that they start making sense almost on their own and give more to the story than an auditive decoration. Onomatopoeia is here to be understood not only in the mimetic sense of sounds imitating what they mean, but also in the etymological sense of word forging, as onomatos means names, and poiein, to make, so the way Eakins's narrators "make words" is also our concern. A creative use of language and the God-like power to forge new words or to redeem archaic usage from oblivion is another way of widening the possibilities open to the poet's fantasy, and a way of communicating one's delight in the sounds and figurations of language to an eager audience of readers as well as listeners. This paper aims at presenting the way onomatopoeias are meant to stand for a voice in nature, as well as, ideally, the voice of nature, and then, how this delight in a non-human form of speech can become subversive, and finally, how this opens new possibilities in language. This form of onomatopoeic language is hybrid, not only in the traditional sense of mixing "a stem in one language plus a suffix or prefix from another" (Cuddon's Penguin's Dictionary of Literary Terms), but in the sense that it is between human and animal expression, between an originally vocal cry and a purely written language, with the mediation of the transcription.

In Patricia Eakins's short stories, onomatopoeias are not only part of a comic soundtrack in a writing mode which is atune to the sounds of words, but are sometimes considered as the remnant traces of a lost language, with its mysterious and fascinating foreignness, and also, sometimes, as an animal language....

Sounds are also the expression of a unified and empirical grasp of the world, before what Eakins calls "the division between vivid and precise" or the division between a scientific approach and a poetic understanding of life: "Well, Buffon was pre-enlightenment. So this is the moment in history when the urge to catalogue everything, the encyclopedic urge, is present, but before the division of voices into vivid and precise. So there is observation and commitment to analysis but there's still that sense of enchantment, of the suffusion of the landscape with imagination" (Interview, 78). A similar concern must have brought Rousseau to write his Essai sur l'origine des langues, où il est parlé de la Mélodie, et de l'Imitation musicale. According to Rousseau, the origins of language and those of music are the same, and originally expressed people's feelings, and both found their natural expression in verse, which came before prose. Derrida comments Rousseau's conception of "a language of pure effusion":

The shouting and crying, the songs of mourners and their "keening" are this "language of pure effusion" which birds and people share in exceptional circumstances, as in "Snakeskins" the carrion birds come to mourn for Fatima as if they were actually singing like people: "Yet the birds would not drive their beaks into her flesh, but only hovered above her, their handlike wingtips spread, their coarse squawking refined to a song as melodious and mournful as the dirge of high-paid mourners" ("Snakeskins" 27). The figures of repetition, such as the anaphora, the anadiplosis, the alliterative doublet build up the motif of a hypnotizing musical theme, bringing verbal expression closer to music in the form of repeated shouting and chanting, as well as the recurrent "keening" (42, 58, 114). This "keening" brings together the animal cry and the human expression of pain in chanting, wordless cries: " Oh, is it Frela who brings that fluttering sound, that hissing, like the sea but softer?" (62). To render these ideal and wordless cries, the words of the story echo softly a number of s and f sounds ("that fluttering sound, that hissing, like the sea but softer"... and the poetic expression justifies the use of words, which are thus endowed with a new nobility and power of suggestion. The character Frela starts speaking in euphonic language, using the "th" sound, and accepting the musical power of the fall into language: "The land wind roughs my feathers and smooths them," Frela croaked, speaking as one of us at last" (62, emphasis mine). This transcription of language with many sound doublets, refrains and figures of repetition is what gives some passages the incantatory power of some African songs and chanting music which we listen to as if we were "between the hooves" of the bull in "Meat Song", in an ecstatic reading or listening experience.....

This delight in the sounds of language is also subversive because it takes expression to a limit. There is a tension between sounds and meaning. Onomatopoeias can express more, but they may also disrupt the syntax and, to a certain extent, take over meaning and obscure it. In "Auravir", the "citizens of Thessaly" are troubled when courtiers explain that if the human king, who first married an auravir female, brings their offspring to the throne, they would have to face the consequences of a king expressing himself in birdlike onomatopoeia such as "tooee tooee tooee...." (50) and their future king would be embarrassingly close to the natural world: "They asked the citizens whether they wished to be ruled by a king who ate flies and whose language was a rain of bird calls" (51). The citizens snobbishly turn their nose at the animality of the auravir king to be, and this may also be understood stylistically as the dramatization of the limits of a mimetic language. The "rain of bird calls" is not specified, but whenever the king's auravir wife is quoted, after the king repudiates her and their children, her "language" sounds incomprehensible and purely antagonistic, like a hostile cry in which anger bursts forth in the stream of the syllabic repetition: "Squatting in the treetops Nephele and her children shake their fingers at the citizens and scold them. They sing 'toli kapapapa toli kapapapapapa' and laugh until the sun comes up" (51-52). There is no way of knowing whether the "papa" sound has anything to do with their father's repudiation, or if this is merely an untranslatable interjection of anger. Their utterance brings into question the relationship between sound and meaning, the hiatus between the two being a possible measure of the creative process, as in poetry. According to Roman Jakobson, "in poetry, any apparent similarity in sound is evaluated in terms of similarity and/or dissimilarity in meaning" (Essays on General Linguistics; Essais de linguistique générale, Minuit: "En poésie, toute similarité apparente dans le son est évaluée en termes de similarité et/ou de dissimilarité dans le sens" (240).

In the way words seem to take on a life of their own and carry the story forward on the sheer suggestive powers of their sounds, Eakins follows what Robert Coover experiences with in "The Adventures of Lucky Pierre", in which a passage he subtitled "Cantus" goes: "In the darkness, softly. A whisper becoming a tone, the echo of a tone. Doleful, a soft incipient lament blowing in the night like a wind, like the echo of a wind, a plainsong wafting distantly through the windy chambers of the night, wafting unisonously through the spaced chambers of the bitter night, alas, the solitary city, she that was full of people, thus a distant and hollow epiodion laced with sibilants bewailing the solitary city". The delight in "sibilants" seems to bring forth the "s" sounds of the "solitary city", in answer to the wind blowing sounds over the city. In a similar way, the half-bird, half-human character of Frela, in "Salt", mostly prefers to speak in onomatopoeias rather than to lose the pleasure of voicing purely gratuitous sounds if she spoke like people: "She knew our speech, but she sang scronse scronse from a beaky mouth. Her head was feathered, her breast was feathered, and feathers grew down to the ankles of her pretty woman's feet" (61). Her interjection or song is quoted with all the authoritative power of a newly made word, "scronse scronse", which in context expresses something of her voracious hunger, a hunger so outstanding it calls for new scrunchy and rough sounding words, as well as for an unusual syntax in the use of the pronoun "a" in the phrase "Frela was racked by a hunger" (61). And Eakins's onomatopoeic form of word-forging is not her only lexical innovation, as she sometimes builds upon a lost etymology as well....

In "The Shade Man" (an uncollected story published in The Iowa Review, vol. 24, 2, 1994, p.96-105), the narrative voice offers what sounds like a literary and lexical program: "Call Me a cultural gene bank, redeeming etymological possibilities" (97). The story "The Shade Man" dramatizes a writer's work in the way the narrator, who is also a writer, inserts rare and extraordinary words in the texture of her sentences, thereby working out as she writes her program of "redeeming etymological possibilities". The Latin word "regeneratrix" is inserted in italics and the sentence structure is disturbed with page numbers in bold characters and countless anacoluthons, or syntactic disruptions: "the way regeneratrix save pennies or string or every fortune they ever page 7 the wreck of unwordable, page — comma, comma, coma — please!" (97). This writer, who seems to have gone wild with the cut-and-paste function of her word processor, takes delight in articulating words, all the more so if they are rare, long, unexpected in context and of rather unusual usage....

Eakins's "redeeming of etymological possibilities" is one way of exploding words. Most often, the archaic usage she calls back to life is transformed and adapted so that it sounds like a new word carrying echoes of obsolete or transformed ones....

Unearthing an archaic form often conveys the precious, rare gift of a linguistic antiquarian to the happy-few lovers of old and odd words. These old words are modified and revisited by an eclectic narrative voice, who customizes them for further strangeness.

Linguistic estrangement is immediate in the incipit of "Daddy's Ibbit Wife", which begins with the creation of two verbs: "The ibbits thumped and woggled beyond my sheep, but they're gone now" (75). The Walt Disney rabbit in "Bambi" is called "Thumper" and his name comes from his vigourous thumping on the ground with his hind paw everytime he appears. Considering that the ibbits are mysterious rabbit-like creatures living in burrows, the onomatopoeic word brings to mind the famous Disney rabbit, while the second verb is even more intricate in its onomatopoeic associations. The word "woggle" does not exist, but resonnates a mixture of the words "wobble" and "boggle" in a porte-manteau type of association which makes the strangeness of the grouping sound vaguely familiar at the same time. The grouping of "to wobble", which means to "move unsteadily from side to side" with "to boggle", which means "1. to be started, to shy away, 2. to doubt, hesitate, have scruples, 3. to dissemble, equivocate, shuffle, 4. to perform awkwardly, to bungle, 5. to be confused, overwhelmed" (Webster's Unabridged), while the noun "a boggle" comes from the Scottish a "bogle", "a specter, a bogy" (ibid.), thus bringing in the ghost-like quality of the ibbits who have disappeared by the time of the narrator's grown-up life, together with their shyness and their confused and easily overwhelmed minds, while calling to mind the fact that they more or less wobble along — all this gives a profusion of jumbled-up meaning in a very short and odd-sounding word, with a density of associations encoded into a condensed expression....

The stories tap all the resources of the English language, from obsolete usage to a form of "ideophonia", or a recurrent sound pattern which can be found in certain words expressing a similar notion. Some passages use the ideophonic qualities of English words, whose roots are built around the same sound. Many words beginning with "gl-", for example, express a quality of light or reflection, as in gleam, glitter, or glimmer (according to Jean Tournier's definition). Several stories rely on the alliterative power of the ideophonic associations, as a supreme form of mimology. In "Milady's Ploy", dead bodies mysteriously "gleam" and take on a form of enigmatic transcendence, as "The dead, stripped of their clothing, had gleamed in the moonlight" (36). This recalls the "Rapturous Gleaming" of the "cult of Fatima's Redemption" in "Snakeskins", a cult that dramatizes the access of dead bodies to glory, associating the words "gleaming" and "glory" more because of their closeness in sound than in meaning, it seems: "And the sun will shine a gleaming path across the salt lagoon of his body, and he will travel it to glory, Forever" (27). And in the story "Milady's Ploy", the warrior's unexplained attitude with a fruit in his hand begins to take on greater significance, because of the occurrence of another series of "gl-" words: "The skin of the plum the Calm One was polishing glistened like glazed blood. He glanced at the upturned faces around him..." (37). What is at stakes in this story is the warrior's refusal to speak, words being the core of the matter, whether they are said or remain unsaid. When he finally speaks, the almost palpable sonority of his words is exemplified in the comparison of his words to "small, white stones" which he uses with great precision: "he answered Bardo's question, pitching his words one by one like small white stones into a dark, still pond..." (37).

The "gl-" beginning of the words functions as a sign for the readers, both giving us a clue on the process which we have come to recognize in the sonorities, and at the same time, setting us outside of this coded process. We can only recognize it is a code, but not quite crack it. We may imitate its workings as in a pure act of glossolalia, but never learn the language. In this sense, the pleasure of reading Eakins's word-play is akin to dabbling in the cabbalistic signs of an unknown language, while delving in a common language at the same time.

And in the case of the "Gleaming", the grouping of words beginning with "gl-" is set up as a reference in the text and seems to carry over across stories as a word which has become almost institutionalized, or at least as lexicalized and from then on, as an intricate part of the language shared by Eakins's readers, which even carries over into another work altogether. A scene in The Marvelous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste, Father and Mother, First and Last takes up the same word, which builds upon anthropological observations, but with a distinct Eakinsian touch in the expression of "sacrificial gleaming", by which the slaves honor the dead: "And the solemn dance with which we honored the sacrificial gleaming on the water — the very path to the beyond — was received with shrieks and titters of merriment in the great house, as the cap to the evening's entertainment" (69).

Word forging and rearranging, and an intricate wordplay on the sonorities and meanings of language is constantly at work in Eakins's prose, submitting language to test of music, and with an innate distrust for the occasional duplicity of verbal expression. In "Daddy's Ibbit Wife", the wife cannot learn how to speak with words because her vocal chords are "shrivelled to hairs" (78), but the physical handicap seems to suit her, as she prefers to express herself in foot language or dancing, in resistance to the human language, and yet in a more intricate manner than animals. She passes this idiosyncratic and unique language on to her children: "And Mommy taught us too, her dance talk. We always knew what she meant, and we'd tell Daddy, 'More beans, more cornbread'" (77). It is an elaborate sign language in which she can express her memories and her elaborate mythology: "And we understood not just her wants, her needs, but her reminiscences" (77). Eakins's use of onomatopoeic language also expresses an elaborate, intricate mythology of the unconscious, and this brings her close to a musical elocution, which would either bypass the meaning of words or play on words to better bring out the physical act of making a sound and building up a rhythm in the celebration of story-telling.

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Works Drawn On for These Excerpts

COOVER, Robert. "The Adventures of Lucky Pierre," Postmodern Culture, vol. 3, no.1 (September, 1992).
DERRIDA, Jacques. De la grammatologie. Paris: Minuit, 1967.
______________. Marges de la philosophie. Paris: Minuit, 1972.
EAKINS, Patricia. The Hungry Girls and Other Stories. San Francisco: Cadmus Editions, 1988.
_____________. "The Shade Man". The Iowa Review, vol. 24, 2, 1994, p.96-105.
_____________. The Marvellous Adventures of Pierre Baptiste, Father and Mother, First and Last. New York: New York UP, 1999.
JACOBSON, Roman. Essais de linguistique générale. Paris: Minuit, 1963.
PALLEAU-PAPIN, Françoise. "A Conversation with Patricia Eakins". Sources no. 5, University of Orléans, France (autumn 1998), p. 71-93.
ROUSSEAU, Jean-Jacques. Essai sur l'origine des langues.
TOURNIER, Jean. Précis de lexicologie anglaise. Paris: Nathan, 1993.