Sitting at home alone in bed when I was 13, and unable to go out because I was undergoing the aftermath of rheumatic fever, I entertained myself with old copies of Reader’s Digest. One of the things I digested thoroughly in the humor columns was puns. I believe it was in one of those columns[i] that I read an entry from a proud punster who told of a woman who had named her new ranch, which was operated by her sons in her behalf , “Focus.” Asked why, she replied “It’s where the sons raise meat.” The author was proud of the fact that this was the only triple pun he knew of. Now it wasn’t that kind of punning that fed this reader’s disgust with the magazine — it was the right-wing politics and red-baiting, which I was old enough to recognize but too young to understand. So now I only read the magazine to keep my contempt fresh. Joseph McCarthy had just recently died, and I had heard him memorialized in an editorial on KSL radio by comparison with the Roman senator Cato, who argued that, for the good of Rome, “Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam” — (Moreover, I advise that Carthage must be destroyed.)[ii] It was the era of the Birch John Society (promoting outhouses) and Walt Kelly’s Jack Acid Society black book, the first piece of political satire I ever bought.[iii]
But when John Pollack talks about puns, he invokes a bigger tent. Talking about Jewish punning he notes that “[i]n the original Hebrew, the Old Testament itself is full of wordplay in general and puns specifically” [iv] and relates how
[i]n 1894 Immanuel Moses Casanowicz, a doctoral candidate at Johns Hopkins University, actually tabulated such wordplay page by page in a dissertation entitled Paronomasia In The Old Testament (Paronomasia is a classical term of rhetoric that encompasses punning.)
One biblical pun that Casanowicz identifies appears in the Book of Job, when the beleaguered, frustrated protagonist suggests to God that “perhaps thou has mistaken iyob (Job) for oyeb (enemy).” It’s not a knee-slapper by any stretch, but at the time, puns weren’t expected to pull the cart of humor.[v]
That may be why Milton’s puns are so serious — and yes, Paradise Lost is full of puns, just as Shakespeare’s plays are. It’s just that Milton’s are more like Job’s. An example:
High on a Throne of Royal State, which far
Outshone the wealth of Ormus and of Ind,
Or where the gorgeous East with richest hand
Show’rs on her Kings Barbaric Pearl and Gold,
Satan exalted sat, by merit rais’d
To that bad eminence; and from despair
Thus high uplifted beyond hope, aspires
Beyond thus high, insatiate to pursue
Vain War with Heav’n, and by success untaught
His proud imaginations thus display’d.[vi]
That stanza, that single sentence, turns on a single word, “merit,” and its prepositional phrase “by merit rais’d To that bad eminence.” There are two meanings of “merit” which Milton is playing with — at least two. My dictionary gives four meanings:
1. Value, excellence, or superior quality…. 2. An aspect of a person’s character or behavior deserving approval or disapproval…. 3. Theology. Spiritual credit granted for good works. 4. Plural. Law. a. A party’s strict legal rights, excluding jurisdictional or technical aspects. b. The factual substance of a case as distinguished from its form and procedural aspects. 5. The intrinsic right or wrong of any matter; the actual facts of a matter.[vii]
Well, five, but who am I to quibble? Certainly not Will Shakespeare. But Milton — now, he uses most of these meanings, which when I squint my OED reassures me were all knownst unto Milton’s age. Even in his blindness, he would not have forgotten that the word comes into English through French “from Latin meritum, recompense, desert, from merēre (past participle meritus), to earn, deserve.”[viii]
Satan thinks in his pride of himself as deserving his bad eminence; Milton, of him as earning it. Satan thinks to argue his case on its merits (that’s what he “thus display’d”) in the next stanza, his primary argument urging his fiends, demons and cunning-men to pursue “Vain War” with heaven, and Milton uses both senses of “vain” too. Pollack, the punster, identifies this as a higher form of punning, again rife in the Old Testament: “so-called Janus Parallels. This is a poetic device in which a punning word, through one of its meanings, echoes the content of the preceding line and, through its second meaning, previews the line to follow.”[ix] In the next stanzas, Satan and his minions, Moloch, Belial and Mammon amongst them, argue how best to attack heaven — again.
Pollack goes on to report that “Gary Gossen, the anthropologist, argues that the more rigid a society becomes, the greater its reliance on subtexts, especially puns, to address sensitive or taboo topics.”[x] Recall Milton’s situation: He is old, blind, living in imminent fear because he has been something like the secretary of state for the Taliban, only to see his Puritan party defeated and the monarchy reinstated. And this is where meaning number 3 of “merit” comes in: “Spiritual credit granted for good works.” In Catholic theology, a saint has merit to bestow on others; in Calvinist theology, all the merit resides in Christ; none of us mere mortals can earn any of it — it is grace freely given. So which merit does Satan apply to himself, and who is this Catholic saint meriting “spiritual credit granted for bad works,” raised to his bad eminence, high on a throne of royal state? Charles II? Perish the thought.
So this is where we stand: the difference between pun and word-play is the difference between “pie in this guy” and “Focus: where the sun’s rays meet.” But, in the case of Milton, the pun never sets on his Satanic majesty’s empire, and we would have to peep about his feet pecking up corns of wordplay for many years to even begin to understand the reach of his rays. When one does not know the referent of wordplay, one is uncertain of what is being played. A fine example of this is found in two of Ray Wylie Hubbard’s songs, “The Way of the Fallen” and “Crows,” and the contrast between the two couldn’t be stronger.[xi] Here are the lyrics to “The Way of the Fallen:”
down in corpus christi, always around midnight
you’ll find the devil limpin’ along cause his shoes is too tight
his hair’s up in pigtails, his whiskers are in braids
he’s talking about the promises he says god forgot he made
oh the way of the fallen is hard
the way of the fallen is hard
the way of the fallen is hard
well the devil’s drinking whiskey he asked me for a match
he lit up a salem and said my friends call me scratch.
you people act so high and mighty, thinking you’re god’s pride and joy —
you’re just assembled from boxcars and put together like tinker toys
oh the way of the fallen is hard
the way of the fallen is hard
the way of the fallen is hard
well the devil’s got a billy goat and he feeds him marmalade
he comes from the world of the born to the world of the made
his eyes is always bloodshot, he says he don’t give a damn
he’s mumbling that the world at large is just an elaborate scam.
oh the way of the fallen is hard
the way of the fallen is hard
the way of the fallen is hard
there’s tears in the devil’s eyes, I ask what’s the matter.
he said these damn religions are spreading like pancake batter
then he took off his shoes and said perhaps I should mention
I prefer to die with a bottle of wine without the comfort of religion
oh the way of the fallen is hard
the way of the fallen is hard
the way of the fallen is hard
the way of the fallen is hard
the way of the fallen is hard
Most of you probably recognize that devil as a minor demon in Satan’s hell, or even as a poor devil deserving of your pity, and for most of you I would venture that the Buddhist undertones don’t even register until you read, or hear, “he comes from the world of the born to the world of the made,” if then (and you should all be so lucky as to have heard this song the first time you encountered it, rather than reading it here). Here, in contrast, are the lyrics for “Crows:”
Some come to in grays and blues and they shake like a tambourine
Some wake up and spit on the fire and it acts like gasoline
Yes sir, some drone on and drool doing nothin’ for heaven’s sake
Some of them act like crows when they find a dyin’ snake
Even crows act like eagles when they find a dyin’ snake
Some been seen with a rusty knife a-walkin’ by the railroad tracks
Some been accused of laying down and workin’ on their back
Yes sir, some drone on and drool, doing nothin’ for goodness sakes
Some of ‘em act like crows when they find a dying snake.
Even crows act like eagles when they find a dyin’ snake.
Some wake up and look around and then they go back to sleep
Some come down and put on flesh and then they start playing for keeps
Yes sir, some drone on and drool, doing nothing for nobody’s sake
Some of ‘em act like crows when they find a dyin’ snake
Even crows act like eagles when they find a dying snake
The liner notes to Crusades of the restless knights say that “One track is even described, accurately enough, as ‘a mythological bluegrass Buddhist Gnostic gospel hymn.’” It could be this song, or it could be “Conversation with the devil.” But of this particular lyric, Hubbard writes following the words to the song: “The phrase about crows either came from a talk by the Dalai Lama on compassion or I heard my grandfather mutter this under his breath when my grandmother found a pint of whiskey under the floorboard of his pickup truck when I was a child.” I love Ray Wylie Hubbard’s songs just as I love John Milton’s epic lyricism. I love the playful seriousness of the one, and the serious playfulness of the other.
But hold on, I hear you say, aren’t we going to get to the absurd War in Heaven bit in book VI when Raphael tells Adam and Eve how Satan fell? How can you keep putting it off?
Your turn.
[i] Or one of the fillers at the butt-end of the article, which would then be filters for the drag of the article.
[ii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cato_the_Elder, accessed 25 April 2013. Wikipedia has an exhaustive article on the phrase “Carthage must be destroyed” itself, which reflects Joseph McCarthy’s bombast towards the Soviet Union.
[iii] Although not the first I ever recognized, being an avid reader of Pogo, Walt Kelly’s daily comic strip.
[iv] The pun also rises : how the humble pun revolutionized language, changed history, and made wordplay more than some antics / John Pollack. New York : Gotham, 2011; p. 96.
[v] Ibid., pp. 96-97.
[vi] Paradise lost : a poem in twelve books / John Milton. – A new edition / edited by Merritt Y. Hughes. – New York : Odyssey, c1962.
[vii] The illustrated Heritage dictionary and information book. — Boston : Houghton Mifflin, c1977
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Pollack, op. cit., p. 97.
[x] Ibid., p. 140.
[xi] “The way of the fallen” is from Snake farm. — Sustain Records, c 2006; “Crows” is from his album Crusades of the restless knights. — Cambridge, Mass. : Rounder Records, c1999. Philo CD 11671-1218-2. Both lyrics are as printed in the booklets accompanying the CDs, with some punctuation added by me, and choruses added in full.
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The pun deserves redemption in our discourse.
Yeah, and that’s what John Pollack is trying to do with _The pun also rises_; but if by “our discourse” you mean “discourse amongst we Mormons,” in my experience that happens most in hymn parodies, as in “High on a mountaintop, a badger killed a squirrel; Ye nations now come up, there’s food for all the world.” I would like to know more puns generated specifically by Mormons for a Mormon audience involving Mormon subject matter.
“the more rigid a society becomes, the greater its reliance on subtexts, especially puns, to address sensitive or taboo topics”
In Romania under Ceausescu, poets would use what they called “lizards*” in their works. These were images that could be read as anti-capitalist/anti-West, but could also be read (between the lines) as a critique of the power structures at home, the hollowness of the system, etc. The trick was to knot your images up — to create a layer of density that could be unpacked by those who knew which layers to peel away and what to stick them to.
*Because the attempt to slip such coded things past the censors was a “cat and lizard game”.
Well, that sometimes takes us by surprise, Wm. William Stafford told me once, speaking of his poem “The animal that drank up sound,” that, when he was on a tour sponsored by the State Department, he read that poem in Iran (back when the Shah ruled). An Iranian poet asked him how he could dare to write, let alone read aloud and publish, so brave a poem. If he had done that, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi would have not only understood the animal as being himself, but have sicced SAVAK on the poet, because in that society, poetry still has the power to kill.