Hope Mirrlees, the Holophrase, and Colonial Linguistics

“I want a holophrase.” The opening of Hope Mirrlees’s Paris has provided a critical entry to this difficult poem for many critics and readers, ever since Julia Briggs’s notes informed us that the concept derives from Jane Harrison’s Themis. The central hope (and lack) expressed by the speaker’s “want” is echoed by the poem’s own search for a holistic mode of expression that can articulate the flâneuse’s full sensory, emotional, and intellectual experience of the city of Paris. The fundamental principle of the concept as Harrison uses it is that it is a feature of “primitive” language development, a stage before the “splitting” of language into parts of speech:

Language, after the purely emotional interjection, began with whole sentences, holophrases, utterances of a relation in which subject and object have not yet got their heads above water but are submerged in a situation. A holophrase utters a holopsychosis. Out of these holophrases at a later stage emerge our familiar “Parts of Speech,” rightly so called, for speech was before its partition.[1]

Here, Harrison evokes a language “coming into being,” summarizing in a sweeping statement the process whereby language purportedly moves from the collective to the individual, from “submerged” to “above water,” from whole to part, from “primitive” to “civilized,” from holophrastic to grammatical language. Like most Mirrlees scholars, I found this concept to be wonderfully productive for thinking about the poem.[2] In relation to my interest in literary multilingualism, the “holophrase” seemed to fit perfectly with my interest in modernist responses to a perceived “crisis of languages,” the fascination in the period with the condition of Babel and the desire to attain some sort of Adamic, originary language or Ursprache. My original plan for this essay had been to explore this in relation to Mirrlees’s multilingualism and her avant-garde sources (Mallarmé, Cendrars, Apollinaire), but, just days before I was due to submit my first draft to the editors, I decided to be more thorough: rather than simply accepting the disembodied quotation from Themis that is frequently repeated in Mirrlees criticism, I went back to Harrison’s text and reread her summary of the term. That investigation led me to realize the fundamentally colonial assumptions that lie behind the central concept of Mirrlees’s Paris, and it hit me that, as Mirrlees scholars, we had been missing something important. I simply couldn’t apply the term now in the way I’d initially intended.

Images of Blackness and empire are a significant element of Paris. As Davida Fernández-Barkan’s essay for this cluster demonstrates, these colonial contexts form the basis of the avant-garde techniques such as Cubist collage that we find in the poem.[3] It is surprising, then, that criticism has tended to note but gloss over Harrison’s treatment of “primitive” language, with the exception of John Lee Moore, who examines the primitivist ideologies of Harrison’s holophrase in relation to Paris, arguing for its importance to an aesthetic of primitivist embodiment.[4] As Moore notes, Harrison’s notion of holophrasis is based on an evolutionary conception of language whereby the speech of “non-Western populations” is placed at an “earlier” stage of development (Moore, “Modernism’s Laughing Bodies,” 29). Although Harrison’s book is about Ancient Greece, and her references to so-called “primitive” language might be initially read in the context of language development in Classical history, the example she gives of a holophrase is a contemporary word from an indigenous American language:

The Fuegians have a word, or rather holophrase, mamihlapinatapai, which means “looking-at-each-other,-hoping-that-either-will-offer-to-do-something-which-both-parties-desire-but-are-unwilling-to-do.” . . . Uneducated and impulsive people even to-day tend to show a certain holophrastic savagery. (Harrison, Themis, 474)

We can see straight away the primitivist assumptions coming through, the separation of the contemporary assumed reader from the implicitly “savage” language of the Fuegians. Moore’s approach leads him to assess primitivist forms of embodiment in Mirrlees; I realized that, in order to understand the holophrase, and therefore to understand Mirrlees, we need to pay closer attention to the history of colonial linguistics. For starters, Harrison is drawing on an inaccurate assessment of the nature of the “Fuegian” language and an inaccurate translation of this particular word.[5] The ideological violence of this appropriation of an indigenous South American language becomes still more apparent, however, when we realize that the language to which Harrison is referring, Yahgan, is a critically endangered language whose last native speaker died in 2022.[6] Ironically, the example given by Harrison to evoke a “birth” of language is now associated with language death.

The example of the Yahgan word does not come from Harrison’s own research. She cites A. E. Crawley’s anthropological text The Idea of the Soul (1909); Crawley in turn takes the example from Edward Payne’s History of the New World Called America (1899) (whom Harrison also cites in Themis); Payne himself takes the word from the missionary Thomas Bridges’s linguistic work in the region.[7] Following the bread-crumb trail of Harrison’s sources thus takes us further and further away from the avant-garde surfaces of Mirrlees’s text, through early twentieth-century anthropology, nineteenth-century historical accounts of the “New World,” and missionary linguistics. If we follow the term “holophrase” itself back to its origin, we are led still further back, to an 1837 essay by the comparative philologist Francis Lieber. The term “holophrase” thus emerges as being steeped in colonial history, evolutionary linguistics, and colonial analyses of indigenous American cultures and languages.

Lieber first introduces the concept of holophrastic language in a letter, “On the Study of Foreign Languages, Especially of the Classic Tongues” (1837). Lieber’s essay, rooted in linguistic relativism, argues for the importance of studying foreign languages as a way of accessing a different world-view, of “discover[ing] a different affinity and affiliation of thoughts and notions, a different perception of things, and a consequently different ramification of ideas; in short a different logic of nations” (Lieber, “On the Study of Foreign Languages,” 507). Inspired by his study of indigenous North American languages, which he deems to be particularly “holophrastic,” Lieber argues that the main variation between languages (conceived as bounded, national languages, in keeping with the dominant Euro-American norms of the period), is the extent to which each language “divides” experiences and phenomena into words.[8] When we see or experience something, he writes:

the impression they make on us, their image which our senses carry to the mind, is one and entire. If I see a young black horse, I do not receive the impressions of youth, blackness, and an animal belonging to the genus horse, separately, but the young black horse stands before me as one whole thing, and my mind receives but one whole impression. (Lieber, “On the Study of Foreign Languages,” 502)

Once that impression has been made, however, “it becomes necessary . . . that we should analyze the phenomenon, separate parts of it, and imagine (consequently name) them separately” (505). In English, the phenomenon is separated conceptually and linguistically into “youth,” “blackness,” and the abstract notion of “horse”; the German language happens to have a distinct word for “black horse”—Rappe—and thus divides the phenomenon into fewer constituent parts (506). The less a word divides a phenomenon (and therefore, the more specific or “individualizing” that word is) the more “holophrastic” it is: “Words, then, which express a complex of ideas we will call holophrastic words—words which express the whole thing or idea, undivided, unanalyzed” (518).

Some languages, for Lieber, manifest more “holophrastic” or “analytic” tendencies than others; all languages present themselves at some point on the scale. “[T]he intrinsic beauty of any idiom,” he writes, depends on its balance of the two (505). For my purposes as a Mirrlees scholar, it is interesting to see that Lieber privileges holophrastic language for literature: “energetic writing or speaking” requires the ability to “express briefly and promptly a whole complex of ideas”—the ability to “pour, as it were, a mass of ideas into the mind—the heart of the hearer.” Thus, [t]he poet uses holophrasis “to shoot the word like an arrow to one single point with unerring aim” (520–521). Particularly appropriate to Paris is the poem’s attempt to present phenomena to us—the flâneuse’s multiplicitous, mobile experience of the city—as “a whole complex of ideas.”

At this stage in Lieber’s thinking, hierarchies of language are only implicit (such as the fact that, despite the purportedly “holophrastic” nature of indigenous North American languages, all of his examples of elegant or poetic holophrasis come from European languages). When Lieber revisits the term, however, in his 1860 essay “Plan of Thought of the American Languages,” the ideologies inherent in his conceptualization of “holophrasis” come to the surface. Lieber explicitly compares the holophrastic language of children and “early nations” (in this context, Indigenous North American languages), situating holophrasis, conceptualized here as “bunch words,” as an “earlier” stage of linguistic development:

I discovered, moreover, that as man begins with perceiving totalities, and then generalizes in his mind, so do children and early nations show the strongest tendency to form and use individualizing words—bunch words, words which, indeed, express a main idea, but along with it a hundred other ideas.[9]

Here Lieber—as Julie Andresen puts it—“opens the door to the evolutionary that was to bedevil linguistics for the rest of the century”: “[W]e have here the Indian-infant image, where the Indian is a child and his/her language childlike, with grammatical processes belonging to the language-acquisition stage (holophrasis). By implication, then, the process of analysis belongs to the world of the rational European-adult.”[10]

From Lieber emerges the notion that the holophrastic languages of “early nations” contain, in living form, the linguistic histories of “advanced” languages. This is a crucial step in the evolution of conceptualizations of holophrasis, and is of particular significance in Harrison’s—and Mirrlees’s—eventual adoption of the term. When it recurs in Payne, we find that holophrasis is now harnessed as “evidence” for evolutionary linguistics. Thus Payne argues that:

The investigator of the American languages has not proceeded far in his task before discovering that he is unwittingly excavating the rude foundations of speech—foundations deeply laid in the nature of thought, animal life, and human society. In the languages of civilization these foundations are hidden in the structure reared around and above them by the action of analytical thought. (Payne, History of the New World Called America, xiv)

As a historian, Payne is drawn to the languages of the Americas as a living source material for the history not only of the region, but of mankind—a history that can no longer be perceived in the “civilised” languages of the “Old World” where “analytical thought” has obscured the originary “foundations of speech” (xiv). It is no coincidence that much of his History of the New World Called America is devoted to the origins of language per se.

It is only a small step further for Crawley, using Payne, to make an explicit link between “primitive language” and “primitive perception” in holophrasis:

We shall find that primitive perception is comprehensive and simultaneous in a high degree. The mode of expression corresponding to this mode of ideation is known as holophrasis, and is the chief characteristic of early language. In its translation of the percept, language here seems, as it were, to be trying to reproduce in sound coexistence instead of succession. It lumps the whole impression together in one phrase, which is actually one word. (Crawley, The Idea of the Soul, 30)

Crawley’s preoccupation with “wholeness” leads him to develop an associated term, “holopsychosis, or whole-thinking,” to denote a mode of thinking that is “undifferentiated” and characterized by “comprehensive ideated synthesis” (60, 62). Harrison draws on Crawley to argue for the development from the collective to the individual in ancient Greek society, using his linguistic examples to present the argument that “primitive man . . . felt himself at first not as a personality separate from other persons, but as the warm excited centre of a group; language tells us . . . that the ‘soul’ of primitive man is ‘congregationalized’” (Harrison, Themis, 475). An obsession with “wholeness” is thus at the heart of these colonial theorizations of “primitive” humanity, an obsession that also leads them to impose a “wholeness” upon the objects of their study. It is no small irony that the holophrase, which found its own origins in Lieber’s firm belief in linguistic relativity, leads Crawley to lump a huge variety of distinct languages together from Southern Africa, North, Central, and South America, Sri Lanka, and Australia under the category of “lower” or “savage.” Indeed, even the individual “languages” named by Crawley are in fact language families, and many of the regions he refers to are extraordinarily linguistically diverse.[11] The theoretical model of evolutionary linguistics allows the anthropologist, then, to homogenize the indigenous languages of colonial territories. What is more, most of the languages he alludes to in his study are now endangered or extinct.

Harrison’s idea of the holophrase, then, derives from a colonial fantasy. Her evocative image of language being birthed, coming up for air from a “subaqueous,” “primitive” state, draws explicitly on anthropologists and linguists who use the full force of academic discourse and the then-legitimacy of colonialist research to present their findings of linguistic “origins” in the indigenous languages of colonial territories. The nostalgia for “wholeness” that we find in Harrison’s text is rooted in primitivist discourses of the “noble savage,” the idea of something “lost” in the “civilizing” process, which in turn becomes central to Mirrlees’s hope for the recovery of some form of holophrase.

So what are the implications of this for Mirrlees’s poem? A short essay like this cannot begin to address the multiple issues and questions raised, so I will draw on a single passage. At the very heart of Paris (and quite literally, at the poem’s center-point), Mirrlees evokes the birth of the art-work and—I contend—draws on a primitivist notion of the birth of language. Paris opens with its speaker descending into the Metro / underworld to the sounds of Aristophanes’s frogs, “Brekekekek coax coax” (line 10) and, as Briggs points out, various images that invoke “themes of empire and of negritude” (Mirrlees, Collected Poems, 3, 113). That descent is followed by a physical re-emergence into the city as the flâneuse continues her travels, but it is at the midpoint of the poem that we see a more significant form of “re-emergence.” The reader has just been listening to the poem’s characteristic onslaught of multiple voices, images, words and languages, which reach a crescendo in a set of apparently trivial snippets of enthusiastic French dialogue. Then, at line 225, the chatter suddenly stops (10). The typography and rhythm of the poem shift from chatter to a “Teutonic” silence that, as Briggs notes, contrasts with the loquaciousness of Parisians and creates a powerful image of something building up piece by piece, emerging from a “subaqueous” state:[12]

Harrison writes that holophrasis is a “submerged” linguistic state within which “subject and object have not yet got their heads above water,” but from which “Parts of Speech” will later “emerge”; Mirrlees here presents a “coming to” of language from water, and the emergence of “[t]hick halting speech.” Briggs reminds us that this passage echoes Mirrlees’s preface to Madeleine, where art—a “dauntless, plastic force”—“builds up” the “stubborn, amorphous substance” of life, “cell by cell, into the frail geometry of a shell.”[14] That birth is also, however, based on fantasies of linguistic origins, and particularly Harrison’s holophrase, which offers tantalizing promises of supposedly “primitive” languages—languages which for many white Western thinkers of the time offered a glimpse of the emergence of European languages, even the emergence of human speech per se. We might dwell, too, on the “[t]hick halting speech” invoked by the poem: “thick” here connotes heavy, indistinct, inarticulate language, perhaps also an accented speech (a “thick accent”) and—considering the colonial context underlying the holophrase and the numerous colonial references of the previous lines—also the racist characterization of Black physiognomy in relation to speech.

After this “coming to,” this rebirth of language, we find the striking calligramme, “There is no lily of the valley” which seems to perform that rebirth: growing out of the page in a single vertical line, its typographical experiment enacts a form of interrupted, “halting” speech that by invoking the flower, also invokes the organic growth of language from a root or source.[15] Mirrlees here is harnessing contemporary avant-garde techniques: she uses the visual line to evoke not only the growing flower, but also the marching strikers on the first of May, and provides a visual echo of a poem such as Apollinaire’s “Il Pleut” (1916). The desire for a holophrase is accompanied by a sense of being restricted by an analytical language that has “split apart” conceptually; Mirrlees’s search for a more vivid, direct, emotive, and affective language also draws on different sensory modalities, so that in this instance the visual and verbal coincide. Typographical experimentation thus allows us to see the image at a glance, recalling Lieber’s summary of the holophrase’s power to “express briefly and promptly a whole complex of ideas” and to “pour, as it were, a mass of ideas into the mind—the heart of the hearer” (Lieber, “On the Study of Foreign Languages,” 520). But if Mirrlees looks backwards to a primitivist notion of language origins and rebirth in her conceptualization of the problem with language, the tools that she explicitly reaches for to reconstruct that linguistic rebirth are drawn from contemporary European avant-garde forms.

Mirrlees’s essay “Listening in to the Past” (1926) presents the evocative idea of a historical wireless radio that would allow the listener to hear voices from the past, uncontrolled “old fragments of human speech blown in from the waste places of the universe”: “No, it will be an aural kaleidoscope, rather than a lesson in history: disparate fragments of Cockney, Egyptian, Babylonian, Provençal, ever forming into new patterns for the ear, but not for the mind” (Mirrlees, Collected Poems, 85). Mirrlees’s imagined historical kaleidoscope is a fantasy of linguistic recovery, a multilingual repository of historical and extinct languages alongside the languages of the present that is rooted in Mirrlees’s interest in the tactile, sensory work of the antiquarian and in Harrison’s theories of art and ritual (Enemark, “Antiquarian Magic,” 115–117). Mirrlees’s vision in this essay does not gesture towards linguistic “origins”: this is a post-Babelian vision of multilingual, trivial chatter, able to produce moments of rare insight or beauty with every turn of the kaleidoscope, but no clear linear historical narrative; it certainly does not evoke the simplified trajectory posited by evolutionary linguistics. On the surface, this “aural kaleidoscope” forms the basis of Mirrlees’s aesthetics of simultaneity in Paris: the voices, images and languages of the poem co-exist in an apparently trans-historical present, constantly forming and reforming into new kaleidoscopic patterns in a persistent “disruption of linearity,” to borrow Nina Enemark’s phrase (115, 126). But if a prelapsarian language cannot be accessed (and it is interesting that Mirrlees does not hold any hopes of hearing mythical originary languages through her historical wireless), so Paris wears its post-Babelian languages much as the first Hogarth Press edition wears the stitched-together patchwork of the harlequin’s costume. The poem’s energy is found in the pull between fragmentation and form, the tension between “parts of speech” and “holophrase.” At certain moments, the kaleidoscopic patterns of Paris do indeed seem to come together into a form of linguistic rebirth—seductive and transient moments of modernist beauty pulled together through the multi-sensory possibilities of avant-garde experimentation. But we must not forget the origins of that beauty, its basis in the colonial conceptualization of the “holophrase.” The extinct languages Mirrlees fantasises about hearing in “Listening in to the Past”—Egyptian, Babylonian—are the languages of lost civilizations; the ideology of the holophrase that she employs in her contemporary avant-garde multilingualism, however, draws on colonial linguistic ideologies that will themselves contribute to linguistic extinction, not revival—to notions of linguistic “wholeness” and “birth” that are historically linked to linguistic deaths.