We can wander a long time in such thickets. There is praeteritio, which is Latin for "I pass over." Thus, Anthony Trollope in a letter to a publisher: "It is an original novel, but it is not for me to say so." Or a kind of disjunctive polysyndeton, the addition of negative conjunctions, as in the U.S. Postal Service slogan: "Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."  There is the splendid negative aposiopesis with which Joseph Conrad opens Victory: "Now if a coal-mine could be put into one's waistcoat pocket--but it can't!" And the Valley Girl's cheerful Interjection: "Not!" And even simple paradox. Old Joke--Speaker's sonorous voice: "A positive word can not be negative." Rasping voice of Professor Sidney Morgenbesser: Yeah, yeah."

Equally significant, as the last example shows--location, location, location. Place important words at the beginning or end, to paraphrase Strunk and White. English idiom confirms the wisdom of this. We like to begin negation at the beginning, to block suspicion or objection: "not at all"; "not in the least"; "not for nothing" (a nicely truncated litotes). Weaseling politicians know the rule instinctively: "Not that I recall. Not to my knowledge." So does Shakespeare: "Not marble nor the gilded monuments / Of princes shall outlive this powerful rhyme."

Less well-known is the hammering thump achieved by placing "not" at the end of a statement. "Man delights not me," Hamlet says. "No, nor woman neither." In As You Like It, the mooncalf Orlando asks what are the signs of love? Pert Rosalind answers, "A lean cheek, which you have not; a blue eye and sunken, which you have not; an unquestionable spirit, which you have not; a beard neglected, which you have not." English poet Henry Reed's soldier studies the flowers and then his rifle and "the point of balance, / Which in our case we have not got." And Tennyson's soldier Ulysses sets out once more, "to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." "What General Lee's feelings were," Grant writes of Appomattox, "I do not know." Jonathan Swift's noble talking horses, the Houyhnhnms, have no word in their language for "lie." Rather, they say, "The thing which was not." And the Book of Job (7:8) carries us to the ultimate last place, extinction: "Thine eyes are upon me, and I am not."

All such negative figures of speech are miniature dramas, the briefest possible creations of conflict, of push and pull, reversal and suspense. But they are short, only phrases. In the context of a scene or story, the word not can create a larger drama, or a character, or even a world. In Denmark Hamlet lives at its mercy: "If it be now, / 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be / now; if it be not now, yet it will come." In Faulkner's "The Bear," "not" defines the protagonist and rushes him forward into the dangerous hunt for the bear, an experience "distilled into that brown liquor which not women, not boys and children, but only hunters drank, drinking not of the blood they spilled but some condensation of the wild immortal spirit." And over on the mean streets of noir, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe knows all there is to know about not. The gangster's moll wants him to leave her house:

 

"Out. I don't know you. I don't want to know you. And if I did, this wouldn't be either the day or the hour."

"Never the time and place and the loved one all together," I said.

"What's that?" She tried to throw me out with the point of her chin, but even she wasn't that good."

"Browning. The poet, not the automatic."

Or finally, in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom, Quentin Compson confronts the South, his lost world, and his heart-rending cry carries not to its absolute limit: "I dont hate it he thought, panting in the cold air, the iron New England dark; I dont. I dont! I dont hate it! I dont hate it!" This is the limit of negation because it conceals--yet makes manifest--an affirmation; as it moves through the passage, negation changes its very nature and meaning, as a larva becomes a chrysalis.

But how could I leave it there?