The actual, the possible and the hypothetical: The significance of the 2nd conditional for the creation of multidimensional worlds in Bruce Boston’s speculative poems
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PWAS-808MateuszMarecki95-104-libre.pdf (58.7 KB)
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2011
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Abstract
Speculative poetry, which has only recently gained critical recognition, deals with presenting novel viewpoints that both speculate about alternative futures and reflect on the present. One of its most acclaimed representatives is Boston, the author of “what if?” poems (e.g., “Gray People,” “Chess People,” or “Parchment People”). On the one hand, Boston’s poems are imbued with utopianism; but on the other, by touching on such subjects as communal memory, inequality within society, ageing and climate change, they serve as a social critique of the reality as we know it. What is less obvious is the very function of the 2nd conditional clauses in creating poetic worlds, which becomes clear when the poems areread in light of cognitive poetics and Text World Theory: the use of 2nd conditional clauses generates three main and interconnected mental spaces: (1) spaces of the real world (implied metaphorically), (2) projected spaces and (3) hypothetical spaces (speculative extensions).Such a space blending combines the actual, the possible, and the impossible in one. As a result, by providing multidimensional alternate construals, speculative poetry enables the reader to look at the actual world from at least three different cognitive perspectives. What is also characteristic of the “what if?” poems is the absence of a base text-world; thus, the deictic projection occurs directly from the discourse world to the wish/epistemic world, preventing readers from finding the initial textual context to which they could refer in the course of reading. Likewise, because of this lack of a base text-world, it remains unclear whether Boston, when using the pronoun “we” in the apodosis part of conditional clauses,addresses humanity in general or rather some elitist group of people. Debatable is also whether the apodosis part results in generating material processes (either intention or supervention processes) or mental processes. In this presentation I discuss in detail the application of the above-mentioned theoretical categories to Boston’s poems and compare the selected texts to his other two poems: “Last Alchemist,” in which 1st conditional clausesappear, and “Dystopian Dusk,” in which 3rd conditional clauses are present. I argue that although from the grammatical point of view the 1st and 2nd conditionals enable the expression of either a more probable future or a past which cannot be changed, it is the 2nd conditional that makes the “what if” poems epistemologically closest to the discourse world.