I was in Crawford and I said I was looking for a book to read and Laura said you oughtta try Camus, I also read three Shakespeares.It was Bush's claim that he'd read Camus that got the most ink, of course, but his reference to "three Shakespeares" also got a lot of people wondering. There was clearly something odd about the construction -- all the newspapers put the phrase in quotes -- but it was hard to pin down. "God, that was FUCKING EMBARRASSING," wrote ginmar. "Who calls reading Shakespeare.....three Shakespeares? Does this guy count on his damned fingers"
Everybody seemed to sense that the phrase was revealing, but of what? Well, you've come to the right place. Are you sitting comfortably?
In a general way, there's nothing wrong with using the name of an artist to refer to his or her works, as in The museum bought two Picassos and a Matisse or She was wearing this fabulous Jill Sander. That's merely a special instance of the process that I described as "systematic polysemy" in a 1995 paper in the Journal of Semantics, a term that covers more or less the same ground as James Pustejovksy's "logical polysemy," Juri Apresjan's "regular polysemy,"and Gilles Fauconnier's "connectors", among other terms. Those are the functions that allow us to use the name of an animal to refer to its meat (the rule called "grinding"), as in We eat rabbit, or the name of a place for its inhabitants, as in Utah voted for Bush.
But while patterns like those often operate very generally, they're often subject to idiosyncratic and language-specific conditions. As Annie Zaenen and I pointed out, for example, the rule of grinding doesn't usually apply in English when the substance that the derived noun would denote is a liquid -- you can say They sprinkle basil on the meat but not They sprinkle safflower. Nor do we say I enjoy a glass of orange with breakfast, even though it's perfectly clear what the sentence would have to mean. And the "portioning" rule that allows you say I drank three beers doesn't work with wines -- I drank three wines last night can only mean "I drank three types of wine," not "I drank three glasses of wine.(For more on these, see also my article on polysemy in the Blackwell Handbook of Pragmatics.
As it happens, the transfer that takes the names of artists into their individual works is subject to some restrictions of its own. We can use the name of a painter or sculptor freely to refer to his or her works -- three Picassos, a new Giacometti, we don't ordinarily do this with the names of composers (*She played two Scarlattis). And we can only use the names of directors and authors in this way when they're associated with genre films or genre fiction. It's a lot easier to say There's a Hitchcock playing at the Bijou than There's a Bergman playing at the Bijou. When we speak of "a John Ford" or "a Kurosawa," we're much more likely to be thinking of the director's genre movies (Westerns or samurai films as the case may be) than his other works. And "a Woody Allen" is much more likely to be, say, Annie Hall than Another Woman.
It's the same with works of fiction. There's nothing odd about saying I love to curl up with an Agatha Christie or a John Grisham, but it's odd to say the same thing of Doystoyevsky or Italo Calvino (I can imagine saying that of Dickens). And while it's fine to say That's my favorite Neil Simon you wouldn't use O'Neill in that way. With literary or cinematic works, that is, the name-to-count-noun construction presumes that the works by the author are more-or-less of a muchness: one's pretty much the same as the next. Which is what makes W's "three Shakespeares" so revealing. It suggests that the President thinks of Shakespeare's works as undifferentiated stuff like Agatha Christie's: for purposes of edification, it's merely the quantity of the stuff that matters; really they're all the same. But then a lot of people have suspected that this particular president has trouble telling comedy and tragedy apart.
Posted by Geoff Nunberg at September 2, 2006 03:58 PM