The Things They Carried as Extended Zeugma
Good evening! I’m here to give you a mini-lesson on an esoteric figure of speech, some examples of how Tim O’Brien uses it, some speculations about wider applications, and a headache. As will become clear to you, I have just committed a zeugma. I hope I have also lied.
An early example of zeugma comes from Quintilian, the ancient Roman rhetorician, who cites the following from Cicero: "Lust conquered shame, boldness fear, madness reason," where the verb "conquered" is understood to also govern the final two phrases in the sentence (Crowley 203).
The 18th century, an age of great rhetorical knowledge on the part of writers and preachers (and at least one writer-preacher, Laurence Sterne), is the heyday of zeugma. In "The Rape of the Lock" Alexander Pope speculates what may happen to Bellinda on a particularly ominous day:
Whether the Nymph shall break Diana’s Law,
Or some frail China Jar receive a Flaw,
Or stain her Honour, or her new Brocade,
Forget her Pray’rs, or miss a Masquerade,
Or lose her Heart, or Necklace, at a Ball....
(Butt 225)
Pope does a beautiful job of contrasting the serious and the superficial in these five lines—will her chastity or her jar become flawed, will she forget her prayers or the masquerade? My paraphrases here fill out an implied zeugma in these lines, but it is in the third and fifth lines where he actually employs zeugma: will she "stain her Honour, or her new Brocade"? Will she "lose her Heart, or Necklace, at a ball"? In these "stain" and "lose" branch out to include (or to be more etymologically correct) YOKE quite different things: lace and a necklace being a bit more easily replaced than a stained honor and a lost heart, as those of you who have been in love may perhaps attest to.
Richard Lanham, in a Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, defines zeugma as follows and again cites an example in Pope: "One verb governs several congruent words or clauses, each in a different way, as in ‘The Rape of the Lock’:
Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey
Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea."
(Lanham 104-5)
The queen sometimes takes counsel and sometimes tea. Laurence Sterne in his great novel Tristram Shandy has Parson Yorick offering spurious reasons why he rides such a broken-down horse rather than the muscle horses or Corvettes he used to ride: "that he could draw up an argument in his sermon,-----or a hole in his breeches, as steadily on the one as in the other…(13). Later Mr. Shandy offers instructions on Love to his brother Toby, and it’s hard to imagine advice ever coming from a less expert source (except, of course, in the political arena, where we see it daily). Trim, mentioned at the end of this, is Uncle Toby’s servant/friend and, apparently, barber:
Shave the whole top of thy crown clean, once at least every four or five days, but oftner if convenient; lest in taking off thy wig before her, thro’ absence of mind, she should be able to discover how much has been cut away by Time-----how much by Trim. (418)
You’ll find a more thorough account of the term zeugma in, depending on their age, what your teachers might call Thrall & Hibbard, which became Thrall, Hibbard & Holman, and which, in its new 9th edition is Harmon & Holman. I am referring to A Handbook to Literature, which is a handbook of literary terms and a book that every English major ought to know a sizeable chunk of. Here is a part of its definition of zeugma:
A term used in several ways, all involving a sort of "yoking": (1) as a synonym of SYLLEPSIS: when an object-taking word (preposition or transitive verb) has two or more objects on different levels, such as concrete and abstract, as in Goldsmith’s witty sentence, "I had fancied you were gone down to cultivate matrimony and your estate in the country," wherein figurative and literal senses of the transitive "cultivate" are yoked together by "and"; (2) when two different words that sound exactly alike are yoked together, as in "He bolted the door and his dinner," wherein "bolted" is actually two different concrete verbs….
(Harmon & Holman 543)
Goldsmith’s good friend, Dr. Samuel Johnson writes in his poem "London," "And now a rabble rages, now a fire" (2). Both rage but in quite different ways.
There is some confusion about the term among rhetoricians. Confusion about zeugma and its relation to syllepsis is treated humorously by Willard Espy (134-36), who provides some good examples, and more authoritatively by the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics , which includes examples of the device by Shakespeare and Milton (905-6).
For our purposes, if you say your friend lost his keys and his mind, you are employing zeugma. If you say that almost any prominent athlete went into almost any bar and left his pistol and his morals at the door, you are employing zeugma. If you say that Martha Stewart made a Christmas wreath and bail, you are employing zeugma.
So, when you read about Lt. Jimmy Cross, in The Things They Carried, that "He carried a strobe light and the responsibility for the lives of his men"(5), you know what figure of speech you are dealing with; and you recognize that the difference in specific gravity of the two is immeasurable.
We see the device again in another description:
But Ted Lavender, who was scared, carried 34 rounds when he was shot and killed outside Than Khe, and he went down under an exceptional burden, more than 20 pounds of ammunition, plus the flak jacket and helmet and rations and water and toilet paper and tranquilizers and all the rest, plus an unweighed fear.
(O’Brien 6)
Notice how O’Brien here delays the climax in creating the zeugma.
These two early usages of zeugma in the book, along with the title, got me thinking about the verb "carry" or "carrying" and the book as a whole. The soldiers in country were carrying not only their equipment, but their pasts (Jimmy’s memories of Martha, for example), their emotional reactions to whatever was presently going on around them, and their hopes, however tentative, for the future. Other stories showed post-war freight being hauled, for example, Bowker’s as he rode around the lake, not stopping at the house of the woman he might have shared a life with had war not intervened. The book as a whole is Tim O’Brien’s freight—resembling not so much the exact materiel transported home from Nam, although in some cases it may be--as time-distorted or out-of-focus old photographs given new clarity by the transforming equipment of modern invention.
Broadened beyond the stories, zeugma describes the human brain, not solely Tim O’Brien’s, in which are yoked—perhaps until death—precious cargo & hazardous, the cheap & mundane & the costly. When we send our sons to war, we are pouring hazardous materials into the pot.
The brain IS the jug which contains the trivial and the trite and mind-altering material which numbs us psychically. The cranium is the pot or cauldron in which all these disparate materials steep and goop up, sometimes seeping into our conscious lives in unproductive or devastating ways.
As we truck down life’s highways, we’re, at my age anyway, 18 wheelers hauling tastes of cookies from our youth, like Proust, and corn dogs and colors of balloons we threw darts at at carnivals as kids & the weight of every mistake we’ve ever made. (Make fewer, students, and your haul’ll be easier.)
We are all portable assemblages of major defects minimized and minor triumphs magnified, but in whose seething brain pans ingredients mix and jostle, readjust, so that horrors magnify and even major triumphs diminish. We bear our pasts in more or less true colors, in more or fewer pixels, the present in its mild and fearful forms, and the future in hopes and wild imaginings in tame or fearful hue. We haul all that, long distance if we’re lucky, and with more or less success.
We are all walking zeugmas, cranially yoking all that makes us us.
We alter crania when we send our sons to war. We sentence those we send to war--and who come home--to carry much we never see and weight we’ll never feel, except perhaps in stories such as those that constitute Tim O’Brien’s zeugmatic novel, The Things They Carried.
Works Cited
Butt, John, ed. The Poems of Alexander Pope. New Haven: Yale UP, 1963.
Crowley, Sharon. Ancient Rhetorics for Contemporary Students. NY:
Macmillan
College Pub. Co., 1994.
Espy, Willard R. The Garden of Eloquence: A Rhetorical Bestiary. NY: E.P. Dutton, 1983.
Greene, Donald, ed. Samuel Johnson. Oxford: OUP, 1986.
Harmon, William & Hugh Holman. A Handbook to Literature. 9th
ed. Upper Saddle
River, NJ: Prentice Hall,
2003.
Lanham, Richard A. A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms. Berkeley: U. of California Press, 1969.
O’Brien, Tim. The Things They Carried. NY: Broadway Books, 1998.
Preminger, Alex, ed. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Princeton, NJ: PUP, 1965.
Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy. NY: W.W. Norton, 1980.