Juxtaposition - What is Juxtaposition?

Definition: Simply stated, juxtaposition means placing things side-by-

side. In art this usually is done with the intention of bringing out a
specific quality or creating an effect, particularly when two contrasting
or opposing elements are used. The viewer's attention is drawn to the
similarities or differences between the elements.
While juxtaposition can be used in terms of formal elements - for
example, the use of aggressive mark-making in contrast to an area of
very controlled shading, or an area of crisp detail against something
softly handled, it more often refers to concepts or imagery. An artist
might juxtapose a machine-made object or urban environment against
organic elements of nature, in order to highlight different qualities in the
two. Note that the way this is done can dramatically change the
meaning: we might regard the machine-made or human-created as
representing safety and order against the uncontrollable strength of
nature; or we might see the fragility and beauty of nature against the
soul-less uniformity of the urban world, depending on the nature of the
subjects or images and the way they are presented.
Pronunciation: jucks-ta-pose, jucks-ta-pos-i-shun
Also Known As: collocation, juxtaposing, juxtapose
Examples:
In Meret Oppenhiem's 1936 Le djeuner en fourrure - 'Luncheon in Fur',
the perplexing juxtaposition of fur and teacup unsettles the viewer, as we
question form and function, and wonder about the answer to Picasso's
quip that 'anything could be covered in fur'.
Definition:
In composition, the placing of verbal elements side by side, leaving it up
to the reader to establish connections and impose a meaning.
These verbal elements (words, clauses, sentences) may be drawn from
different sources and juxtaposed to form a literary collage.
Examples and Observation:
"Watchmen at lonely railroad crossings in Iowa, hoping that they'll be
able to get off to hear the United Brethren evangelist preach. . . .
Ticket-sellers in the subway, breathing sweat in its gaseous form. . . .
Farmers plowing sterile fields behind sad meditative horses, both
suffering from the bites of insects. . . . Grocery-clerks trying to make
assignations with soapy servant girls. . . . Women confined for the
ninth or tenth time, wondering helplessly what it is all about. . . ."
(H.L. Mencken. "Diligence." A Mencken Chrestomathy, 1949)



"'We could take your name,' she said, 'and send it to you.' And it
wouldn't be so bad if only you could read a sentence all the way
through without jumping (your eye) to something else on the same
page; and then (he kept thinking) there was that man out in Jersey, the
one who started to chop his trees down, one by one, the man who
began talking about how he would take his house to pieces, brick by
brick, because he faced a problem incapable of solution, probably, so
he began to hack at the trees in the yard, began to pluck with
trembling fingers at the bricks in the house. Even if a house is not
washable, it is worth taking down. It is not till later that the exhaustion
sets in.



"But it is inevitable that they will keep changing the doors on you, he
said, because that is what they are for; and the thing is to get used to it
and not let it unsettle the mind. . . ."
(E.B. White, "The Door." Poems and Sketches of E. B. White. Harper &
Row, 1981)



"The word cannot be expressed direct . . . It can perhaps be indicated
by mosaic of juxtaposition like articles abandoned in a hotel drawer,
defined by negatives and absence . . ."
(William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch. Grove Press, 1962)



"We live and learn, that was a true saying. Also his teeth and jaws had
been in heaven, splinters of vanquished toast spraying forth at each
gnash. It was like eating glass. His mouth burned and ached with the
exploit. Then the food had been further spiced up by the intelligence,
transmitted in a low tragic voice across the counter by Oliver the
improver, that the Malahide murderers petition for mercy, signed by
half the land, having been rejected, the man must swing at dawn in
Mountjoy and nothing could save him. Ellis the hangman was even
now on his way. Belacqua, tearing at the sandwich and swilling the
precious stout, pondered on McCabe in his cell."
(Samuel Beckett, "Dante and the Lobster." Samuel Beckett: Poems,
Short Fiction, and Criticism, ed. by Paul Auster. Grove Press, 2006)



Ironic Juxtaposition
"Ironic juxtaposition is the fancy term for what happens when two
disparate things are placed side by side, each commenting on the
other. . . .

"Olivia Judson, a science writer, uses this technique to tweak our
interest in what could be a stultifying subject, the female green spoon
worm:
The green spoon worm has one of the most extreme size differences
known to exist between male and female, the male being 200,000
times smaller than his mate. Her lifespan is a couple of years. His is
only a couple of months--and he spends his short life inside her
reproductive tract, regurgitating sperm through his mouth to fertilize
her eggs. More ignominious still, when he was first discovered, he was
thought to be a nasty parasitic infestation.
(from Seed magazine)
The author's point of view is a sly wink, the humiliation of the
minuscule male sea creature serving as an emblem for his crude and
increasingly miniaturized human counterpart. The juxtaposition is
between worm sex and human sex."
(Roy Peter Clark, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every
Writer. Little, Brown and Company, 2006)



Haiku and the Principles of Juxtaposition
"The term juxtaposition . . . can also refer to a rhetorical technique
which goes beyond the straightforward placement of communicative
elements next to each other. In this more specialized sense,
juxtaposition can be defined as:
combining together two or more communicative elements so as to
suppress the connections between them and emphasize the differences,
thereby provoking some surprise or puzzlement at their close
placement.
Some simple principles of juxtaposition can be illustrated at work in
the following translations of 17th- and 18th-century Japanaese Haiku.
Haiku 1

Harvest moon:
On the bamboo mat
Pine tree shadows.

Haiku 2

Wooden gate.
Lock firmly bolted:
Winter moon.
. . . In each case there is only an implicit connection between the
elements on either side of the colon. Although it is possible to see a
causal relation between a harvest moon and pine tree shadows, the
lack of explicit connections forces the reader to make an imaginative
leap. The connection between a locked wooden gate and a winter
moon demands an even greater imaginative effort. In each poem there
is a basic juxtaposition between a natural image and a human one--a
harvest moon and a bamboo mat, a bolted gate and a winter moon--
which creates a tension between the first and second part."
(Martin Montgomery, et al., Ways of Reading: Advanced Reading
Skills for Students of English Literature, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2000)



Radical Juxtaposition: The Collage Principle
"The Surrealist tradition . . . is united by the idea of destroying
conventional meanings, and creating new meanings or counter-
meanings through radical juxtaposition (the 'collage principle').
Beauty, in the words of Lautramont, is 'the fortuitous encounter of a
sewing machine and an umbrella on a dissecting table.' . . . The
Surrealist sensibility aims to shock, through its techniques of radical
juxtaposition."
(Susan Sontag, "Happenings: An Art of Radical
Juxtaposition." Against Interpretation, and Other Essays. Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1966)



A Rhetoric of Cool
"My own interest in creating a rhetoric of cool reflects the
Burroughs/McLuhan method of composing; the meanings of cool that
direct my thinking all stem from an initial temporal juxtaposition.
The very process of juxtaposition, [Marshall] McLuhan felt, is a cool
one for how it forges readers (and writers) to interact with the
unexpected textual and visual associations juxtapositions force us to
encounter. . . .

"To teach juxtaposition, composition studies has to put aside the
fixation on order 1963 idealized composition practices stress at the
expense of necessary rhetorical conflict. My interest is in using those
points regarding juxtaposition . . . to theorize how juxtaposition can
thus function 'as dare' and teach students writing outside of 'the neatly
ordered' systems believed to be the only authentic method. Another
model for such work, and related to hypertext because of its ability to
interconnect a wide variety of ideas and texts, are the DJ samples that
comprise a great deal of hip-hop."
(Jeff R. Rice, The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New
Media. Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 2007)



Pastiche
"Pressed to its limits, artistic juxtaposition becomes what is
sometimes termed pastiche. The goal of this tactic, which has been
employed in both high-culture and pop-culture contexts (e.g., MTV
videos), is to barrage the viewer with incongruous, even clashing
images that call into question any sense of objective meaning."

(Stanley James Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism. Wm. B.
Eerdmans, 1996)


Definition:
A rhetorical term for phrases or clauses arranged independently:
acoordinate, rather than a subordinate, construction. (Contrast
withhypotaxis.) Adjective: paratactic.
Parataxis is sometimes used as a synonym for asyndeton--that is, the
coordination of phrases and clauses without coordinating conjunctions.
However, as Richard Lanham demonstrates inAnalyzing Prose (see
below), a sentence style may be both paratactic and polysyndetic (held
together with numerous conjunctions).
See also:
Etymology:
From the Greek, "placing side by side"

Examples and Observations:
"I came; I saw; I conquered."
(Julius Caesar)



"Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better--splashed to
their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas,
in a general infection of ill-temper, and losing their foothold at street
corners."
(Charles Dickens, Bleak House, 1852-1853)



"In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white
in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the
channels."
(Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms, 1929)



"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation,
I needed a home in the country. What I had was a coat, a hat and a
gun."
(Raymond Chandler, Farewell, My Lovely, 1940)



Joan Didion's Paratactic Style
"I remember walking across 62nd Street one twilight that first spring,
or the second spring, they were all alike for a while. I was late to meet
someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and
stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had come out of the West
and reached the mirage. I could taste the peach and feel the soft air
blowing from a subway grating on my legs and I could smell lilac and
garbage and expensive perfume and I knew that it would cost
something sooner or later . . .."
(Joan Didion, "Goodbye to All That." Slouching Towards Bethlehem,
1968)



Toni Morrison's Use of Parataxis
"Twenty-two years old, weak, hot, frightened, not daring to
acknowledge the fact that he didn't know who or what he was . . . with
no past, no language, no tribe, no source, no address book, no comb,
no pencil, no clock, no pocket handkerchief, no rug, no bed, no can
opener, no faded postcard, no soap, no key, no tobacco pouch, no
soiled underwear and nothing nothing nothing to do . . . he was sure of
one thing only: the unchecked monstrosity of his hands."
(Toni Morrison, Sula, 1973)



Natalie Kusz's Use of Parataxis
"I packed some books and a portable typewriter, drove to Homer on
the coast, and rented a cabin near the beach. Something about the
place, or its fishy air, or my aloneness in the middle of it, worked
somehow, and I breathed bigger there in my chest and wrote more
clearly on the page. I had forgotten about tides and about the kelp and
dried crabs that came in with them, and every morning I shivered into
a sweater, put combs in my hair, and walked out to wade and to fill
my pockets with what I found. I liked it best when the wind was
blowing and the sky was gray, and the sounds of seagulls and my own
breathing were carried out with the water."
(Natalie Kusz, "Vital Signs." The Threepenny Review, 1989)



Walt Whitman's Paratactic Style
"Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, formno object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space--ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold--the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons
continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring's invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn."
(Walt Whitman, "Continuities")



Characteristics of Paratactic Prose
"In paratactic prose, clauses are loosely connected, creating a lopping
discourse of here's another thing and another thing and another thing.
. . . Paratactic prose occurs more frequently in narrative and
explanation, and hypotactic prose more frequently in
explicitarguments."
(Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Style: The Uses of Language in
Persuasion. Oxford Univ. Press, 2011)


"When clauses are linked in a relationship of equality, we say that the
relationship is paratactic. Parataxis is the relationship between units
of equal status. . . . Paratactic linking is often treated as equivalent
to coordination . . .; more exactly, coordination is one type of
parataxis, others being juxtaposition and linking by conjunctions such
as so and yet."
(Angela Downing and Philip Locke, A University Course in English
Grammar. Prentice Hall, 1992)


"A series of short phrases or clauses equalized by parataxis seems
almost to invite these repetitive openings [anaphora]. We are
reminded, on the one hand, of Scripture's ritual iterations--a list of
'Thou shalt nots' or 'begats.' On the other hand, the humble laundry list
comes to mind. When you think of it, ordinary workaday prose is
often taken up with lists. They represent parataxis par excellence. . . .

"But parataxis can be a contrived, patterned, self-conscious style, one
whose syntax can carry . . . an allegorical meaning of its own. It is
easy to write a laundry list, but not so easy to write like Hemingway
without falling into parody. Try it."
(Richard A. Lanham, Analyzing Prose, 2nd ed. Continuum, 2003)


"Parataxis allows for the coherence of a narrative's themes to be
independent of the sequential organization of the story elements. Use
of paratactic ordering is common in folksongs and even myths where
the rearrangement of story elements in their order of presentation does
not damage or confuse the story. For example, switching verses three
and five of a seven-verse paratactic song would not alter the theme or
tale presented, since linear progression is not an essential component
of these works."
(Richard Neupert, The End: Narration and Closure in the Cinema.
Wayne State Univ. Press, 1995)



A. Bartlett Giamatti on the Paratactic Style of Baseball
"Here the oft-told tale that is the game is told again. It is told always in
the present tense, in a paratactic style that reflects the game's
seamless, cumulative character, each event linked to the last and
creating the context for the next--a style almost Biblical in its
continuity and instinct for typology."
(A. Bartlett Giamatti, Take Time for Paradise: Americans and Their
Games. Summit Books, 1989)