Enantioseme

Near-synonyms: autoantonym, auto-antonym, autantonym; contronym, contranym

As a word[,] "cleave" may make only a single appearance in [Henry] Vaughan['s book titled Silex Scintillans], but the idea runs throughout the poetry. What Roland Barthes labeled an "enantioseme"—a self-opposing verbal sign²²—cuts, I believe, to the heart of Silex Scintillans: the emphasis everywhere on separation, on the force of severing and suffering, yielding, in turn, the desire to ever cleave and cling. The ultimate tension between these two responses in Vaughan produces not so much a poetry of "either/or"—to adopt Belinda Humfrey's recent phrasing²³—as a poetics of doubling (a head for a head, as it were) in which one form of cleaving shadows or "spells" the other.

If not an enantioseme, 'aestheticism' is at least amphibolous. This book wholeheartedly endorses [Allan] Megill's concept of 'aestheticism' as the philosophical impulse become mythopoeic, but here the idea of art as an enclosed sphere will be given the strong ethical sense of a responsible contract made from and between author and reader.

From a strictly semantic point of view, the sentence 'I am dead' asserts two contrary elements at once (life, death): it is an enantioseme, but is, once again, unique: the signifier expresses a signified (death) which is contradictory with its enunciation. And yet, we have to go further still: it is not simply a matter of a simple negation, in the psychoanalytical sense, 'I am dead' meaning in that case 'I am not dead', but rather an affirmation-negation: 'I am dead and not dead'; this is the paroxysm of transgression, the invention of an unheard-of category: the 'true-false', the 'yes-no', the 'death-life' is thought of as a whole which is indivisible, uncombinable, non-dialectic, for the antithesis implies no third term; it is not a two-faced entity, but a term which is one and new.

Coetzee's use of enumeration and metaphor, image and voice have received some attention from the more linguistic minded of his commentators, most notably by Carrol Clarkson and Jarad Zimbler. Less attention has been paid to his obsessive, almost myopic, treatment of single words, although Clarkson does address the multiple, and ambivalent, meanings of 'care', and Zimbler considers how Coetzee grants particular phrases 'substance', through their repetition in the middle works. Clarkson's examination of 'care' and Zimbler's consideration of 'substance' are useful interrogatives for Coetzee's substantive words (nouns and verbs). Coetzee condenses the semantic content of words until they 'crack' into self-contained antonyms, which displaces their conventional significance (i.e. they become enantiosemes). I want to take the arguments of Clarkson and Zimbler one step further to ask what substance can be made of Coetzee's 'insubstantials': adjectives and adverbs. Chapter 4 argues that Coetzee communicates his ambivalence about the role of the writer, as creator of fiction on the one hand and public intellectual on the other, in polyvalence of particular adjectives and adverbs. By examining how Coetzee turns the words 'mere' and 'merely' in enantiosemes, I will demonstrate how his literary cynicism troubles stylistic gestures towards the difference between surface and depth.