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Abstract

Text as ahedgerow Text, what it is and what it is like, has always been a topic of discussion in philology. In turn, the variety of description of text and the interconnected definitions of work and document have been enormous, and specifying them never ends. As we operate in abstract nouns qualifying human activity, the conceptual metaphor that we choose considerably affects the direction of thinking. The article proposes a critical overview of commonly used images of text: net, structure, fluid water, forest, garden etc., and suggests a new metaphor, ‘text as a hedgerow’. This concept differs particularly from former organicist imagination drawing on the vitality of a wild plant, in that it directs the view to the meeting point of spontaneity and reasoning, the involuntary and the planned, the natural and the acculturated or tamed. Besides the spontaneous pull towards the sun (in the case of literature, towards fame), the image of a hedgerow implies conscious grafting, orderly pruning, and planned shaping. Even more important is the tension between the function prescribed by the author, the editor or the reader, and uninhibited and unpredictable growth. The natural structures of branching out and leafing, determined by vegetative conditions that enact the tendencies of syntactic connectivity, and the tension of form imposed by the pruner, are always complicated.