In the Place of Language by Brodsky Claudia;

Author:Brodsky, Claudia;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2009-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

AFTERWORD

Gravity: Metaphysics of the Referent

“GRAVE” IS AN especially polysemous, formally versatile word in English, whose history of multiple meanings and grammatical functions betrays an unusually dense nexus or set of concepts when compared with the lexical differentiation of these in related, and relatively less hybrid, modern languages. Locative (dative case) descendant of the Old English graf or graff deriving from grafan, “to dig,” “grave” in Middle English designated the location of a specific object of digging, a “place of burial,” the name of an action, in the form of a transitive verb, attributed to the end of that action, in the form of a substantive.1 By the thirteenth century, the nominal meaning of “grave” had extended significantly, from that of the particular piece of ground set aside for “the reception of a corpse” to any portion of ground instead appropriated by and passed on to the living. Spanning the substantive and categorical gaps between place and person, and past and present, this powerful, metonymic development encompassed both the particular plot of earth appropriated for the dead and “any person put in charge of property” (thus “landgrave,” “margrave,” and the foreign language, Graf, or “count”) in its range of meaning.

In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that semantic field expanded further into another register, as the physical—spatial or human—“grave” was figuratively equated in popular and proverbial expressions with the essential definition (“turning in one’s grave”), end (“one foot in the grave”), or incommunicability (“secret as a grave”) of the individual life. In pastoral, hymnal, and elegiac verse from Wycliffe through Gray, Wordsworth, and Shelley, “grave” came to stand not for the defining limit of life but for its opposite, the general “state or condition of being dead,” or incumbent fact of “death,” linked to the experiences of living, if at all, by an adverbial prefix or postverbal marker of negation (Wordsworth, The Prelude, Bk. I, l.267: “Unprofitably traveling toward the grave”; Shelley, “Preface to Alastor: “he descends to an untimely grave” and “Those who love not their fellow-beings live unfruitful lives, and prepare for their old age a miserable grave”; Alastor, l.720: “Birth and the grave, that are not as they were”). Still in the fourteenth century, “grave” was used, in addition, to mean the artificial intersection of the living and the dead, the concrete representation, present to the living, of something no longer present but formally perfected: “the graven image.”

While its nominal meanings developed, “grave” continued to change as a verb. Its limited earlier meaning, “dig”—literally expanded, in the eleventh century, to mean “dig out,” or “excavate”—included the notion of excavation both as historical uncovering and aesthetic formation, the partial removal of matter signified by “carve” and “engrave.” The placement of a body taking the place of the earth it displaces, and the artificial production of space as meaningful form appear the reversed or negative images of a single activity, as “grave” came to signify, in the thirteenth century, both “bury,” or “deposit in the ground,” and “record by engraved or incised letters.

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