Book Reviews

Dogmatizing Discourse

Evan Carton. The Rhetoric of American Ro- mance: Dialectic and Identity in Emerson, Dickin- son, Poe, and Hawthorne. Baltimore: Johns Hop- kins University Press, 1985. ix, 288 pp. $25.00.

Ross Chambers. Story and Situation: Narrative Seduction and the Power of Fiction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. xxii, 279 pp. $14.95, paper.

Ken Frieden. Genius and Monologue. Ithaca: Cor- nell University Press, 1985. 211 pp. $19.95.

Jefferson Humphries. Metamorphoses of the Raven: Literary Overdeterminedness in France and the South Since Poe. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985. xix, 196 pp. $25.00.

It is one of the great ironies of radical discourse that the more persuasively it presents its chal- lenges to the reigning ideology, the more likely it is to supersede that ideology as the new orthodoxy, the new authoritarian discourse to be dislodged by a new generation of radicals. So fared the New Criticism, which taught my high school teachers how to teach me literature-though by the time I entered college in 1972 the edifice was already crumbling under the combined assault of phe- nomenology, structuralism, psychoanalysis, myth criticism, and so on, and by the time I started on my Ph.D. in 1981 it was already defunct.

And the same thing now seems to be happen- ing to deconstruction. The fifties were the decade of dogmatization for the New Criticism, when a new set of interpretive practices were transformed into an institutionalized belief structure; the sev- enties, or the late seventies and early eighties, were (in America) the period of dogmatization for de- construction, when Derrida’s assaults on the meta- physics of presence became the new metaphysics of-well, of absence, but an absence which (as Derrida would of course cheerfully admit) assumes the ideological function of presence. To believe in nothing, and to interpret all beliefs as fundamen- tally a belief in nothing: thus is Derrida vulgarized by his dogmatic imitators. With such vulgariza- tions in the air, the end is surely near (though predictably, it delays).

I am certainly not the first to point out this dogmatization of Derrida; attacks on deconstruc- tion as the new formalism, the new orthodoxy, the

new normative interpretive institution, are legion. But as Gertrude Stein says, there is no repetition, only insistence.’ And I insist on this new ortho- doxy in the face of four new books, all very differ- ent, all mining different intellectual traditions- historicism in Frieden, Richard Chase’s notion of self-conscious American romance in Carton, structuralism in Chambers, Southern literature in Humphries-but all through the lens (much filed and shaved at) of deconstruction, which seems to be the lens to use. Is it? Is deconstruction now unavoidable?

All four authors use Derrida (Heidegger, La- can, Bloom, and so forth) creatively, to work to integrate deconstructive (anti)concepts into their own pressing methodological concerns, some more successfully than others (in Carton it is virtually flawless; in Humphries i t is flawed but much more interesting for its flaws). But what does this fact say about the future of deconstruction? Is the in- stitutionalization of a set of interpretive practices a good or a bad thing? Should we be content or troubled to see graduate students flocking in the tens of thousands into the latest trendy crit- ical camp? Personally, I a m troubled; but that may have something t o do with the fact that not too many years ago I was one of those graduate students flocking into the deconstructive camp: I wrote my own dissertation, in 1983, in the same trans-Derridean mode as Evan Carton’s (give or take), and it appeared in book form, a few months after his, on the same publisher’s list.2 But of that , more later.

For now, note Frieden’s introductory remarks: “Despite my disclaimers, some readers will mis- understand Genius and Monologue as a history of ideas” (p. 7). It is not one, he says; i t just “consid- ers key words arid literary forms associated with inspiration and individuality” (p. 23). He does do it in the grand tradition of intellectual history- maybe not as “solidly” as Lovejoy and Curtius and Auerbach and company (intellectual solidity is one of the things Derrida insistently puts un- der erasure, as Paul de Man used t o say), but in much the same way. He traces the concepts of genius and monologue from Socrates’ dairnonion, through Philo on angels and Satan, Shaftesbury, Addison, and others on genius, t o Heidegger and Derrida on monologue, Then he shifts from phi- losophy to literature: Shakespeare, Coleridge, Poe, and the modern internal monologists. This work is very neatly done; the two key words are excellent choices, excellent mates, just surprising enough to make the obviousness of the juxtaposition a dis- covery.

One of Frieden’s models, I would imagine, is

35

Auerbach on f igum3 But another is Heidegger on the pre-Socratics (and Derrida on Heidegger and everybody else): the bringing of etymology to bear on philosophical problems, not in the discred- ited historicist mode of Auerbach, but heuristi- cally, rhetorically, hermeneutically. What Frieden is manifestly trying to do is t o update or revivify a discredited scholarly tradition, and he puts dis- tance between himself and the tradition for rhetor- ical reasons: not because he is so different from Auerbach in fact, but because he does not want readers to assume that is all he is doing.

This rhetorical maneuver is tried and true, and I certainly have nothing t o say against it. What nags at me a3 I read Frieden is that the negative tradition of Heidegger and Derrida is really not much of an addition to the old historicism. De- construction has been institutionalized so easily in American critical circles because Derrida and com- pany are ultimately in pretty fundamental agree- ment with their historicist and other “metaphysi- cal” predecessors on key discursive issues (mono- logue and dialogue, especially, as I will argue be- low). Hence, finally-and the apparent irony here is only apparent-Frieden uses Derrida t o help tame his key words, “genius” and “monologue,” into a tidy monological history.

He does so most clearly, I think, in his treat- ment of monologue. He says in his introduction that “On the level of discourse, monologue is a turn away from dialogue. The language of an in- dividual is monological to the extent that it devi- ates from dialogical conventions of speech” (p. 17). But I am not sure I know what he means by “di- alogical conventions of speech.” Certainly speech tends to be dialogical, but do we have “conven- tions” of dialogical speech? Because Frieden never broaches theoretical inquiries into either “conven- tion” or “dialogue,” it is hard to tell. I a m also not sure whether he is simply paraphrasing the above (offering a synonym for “conventions”) when he says that monologue is a deviation from dialogical norms, two paragraphs down: Extraordinary language philosophy comes into being when, unable to secure its authenticity, the singular subject allies itself with phenomena of linguistic de- viance. Radical mono-logos arises as a divergence from norms of ordinary dialogical language; internal speech is only the most familiar form of solitary language, dis- tinct from and yet associated with semantically isolated modes. While internal speech is not necessarily deviant, literary monologues are typically bound up with differ- ence, as if the monologist had an inherent tendency to deviate. At the same time that monological swerves produce illusions of individuality, the achieved individ- ual expressions threaten communal norms and tend to-

ward meaninglessness. (pp. 17-18)

I for one a m not aware that there are, or ever have been, any dialogical norms in the West. The norm as far as I know has always been monological. In fact, more than monological i t is logical, “logo- centric” Derrida would say, the Logos, the single all-encompassing, all-creating Word of God, which is pure and unified and ideally resistant to scat- tering. The scattering of tongues at Babel was a turning away from (or falling out of) the monolog- ical norm set in Eden, but ever since we have been trying to get back, trying to imitate the high pu- rity of the Logos, trying to pare off all dialogical complexity and reachieve the ideal divine mono- logue.

Frieden is in fact centrally concerned with a mythic “fall” of this sort and in his first two chap- ters looks closely at precisely the Platonic and Old Testament accounts of the shift. But the con- cepts of monologue and dialogue remain strangely opaque, largely, as I say, because Frieden does not deal with the problem of norms and deviations. “According to Hegel,” he writes, “the daimonion turns Socrates inward, away from Athenian norms, and makes Socrates a forerunner of modern sub- jectivity” (p. 28). Not only does Frieden nowhere establish what the Athenian norms were (or ask whether such a thing can be established), but he also nowhere even wonders how we can determine their normality apart from the Socratic act of devi- ation. Did the norms exist in Athens, just waiting for Socrates to come along and deviate from them, or did Socrates’ deviation teach us to imagine a set of norms as a calculus-fiction, to explain his deviation as a deviation, after the fact?

The historical myth Frieden sets up proceeds along roughly Derridean lines. Hayden White would call it ironic, in his adaptation of Frye’s mythos:* the first stage (Biblical) is dialogue on God’s terms, in which the human reply is intro- jected into the divine Logos (which is to say, mono- logue in disguise); the second stage (Romantic) is human monologue, in which the divine Logos is introjected into human solitary speech; the last stage (modern, via Derrida) is the impossibility of monologue. Monologue disappears up its own deconstructed fundament. And yet-and here I think Frieden’s reliance on the combined institu- tionalized methods of historicism and deconstruc- tion begins to let him down-monologue continues, in Frieden’s voice, or in the voice Frieden borrows from two and a half millennia of philosophical, theological, and scientific discourse, the one voice that is no voice, the Voice That Tells The Truth. Frieden elucidates the impossibility of monologue

36

in modern discourse; but does so monologically. In the passage I cited earlier Frieden claimed,

“At the same time that monological expressions produce illusions of individuality, the achieved individual expressions threaten communal norms and tend toward meaninglessness” (p. 18). But that is really only rarely true. It is true only in a few iconoclastic cases, where artists defy commu- nal norms of monologue (not dialogue), univocal norms of clarity, rationality and the like, and push monologue to an extreme where meaning begins to break down. Mostly monologue is ritualized, institutionalized, tamed in the bourgeois image of the Enlightenment (or of Aristotle): be clear, be reasonable, be logical, be decorous (do not swear for God’s sake), speak in a single unified voice, and depersonalize that voice until you no longer speak, but the voice of truth (institutionalized ge- nius) speaks through

Thus, I believe, Frieden ignores far too much of the intellectual history of his key word “monologue”-largely because, I think, his history is itself monological. Monological method blinds him to his complicity in what he describes. I am deconstructing Frieden, of course, but I think not in an entirely Derridean mood; my conclusion is not that Frieden was destined by diflkrance to err in this way, or that all anybody can do is go round and round the same circles forever, but the op- posite: that a few steps out of the institution- alized analytical games that Derrida shares with the intellectual historians might have opened his eyes to the dialogical complexity of real speech, to the possibility that there are ways out-there &re other ways of understanding things, other modes of knowing which lie beyond the reach of the mono- logical inscription: intuitive understanding, under- standing through laughter or tears-bodily under- standing, emotional understanding. Visionary un- derstanding (Frieden’s subject) often gets reduced to the univocity of monologue, once the single true interpretation has been imposed on the cacophonic and “caciconic” dream sequence, but it need not be reduced like that. And I would deny Frieden’s basic assumption, his totalizing assumption that modern literature is fundamentally and increas- ingly monological. It is only if that is what you are looking for.

Poe too provides good examples of monolog- ical genius, of course, and in his chapter on Poe Frieden discusses several of them: the narrators of “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” “MS. Found in a Bottle,” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” But that is not all Poe provides. Again, that is just all Frieden is looking for. Frieden never even mentions the dia-

logues, for example. The mesmeric revelations, the angelic colloquies-these may just be monologues in disguise, as we will see Evan Carton arguing in a moment, but Frieden does not seem to be aware of the problems they pose for his argument.6

In fact, he seems in his readings of Poe tales to be more concerned with deviant genius than with monologue. For example, he quotes the nar- rator of ”The Imp of the Perverse” as saying “For weeks, for months, I pondered upon the means of the murder,” and comments that this speaker, as well a~ that in “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “break ac- cepted conventions by employing the definite arti- cle, where ‘the idea’ and ‘the murder’ have not been previously explicated. If we read these narrators as mimetic characters, their linguistic deviations may be signs of defective mental processes. From another perspective, however, ill-formed syntax is a contradiction embedded in the narrative by Poe, to enhance the contradictions in the narrator’s ac- count” (p. 164).

This reading is fairly typical of Frieden-and of his uncritical invocation of “dialogical conven- tions” and “dialogical norms.” Not only is i t an old novelistic convention to use “the” with no previous reference, a way of putting the reader in the middle of the action, but real people also do it all the time in speech, start in with “the” without first refer- ring to the thing they are talking about, when they break from thought into speech carelessly, without dressing their words up in conventional grammat- ical norms.

And in any case, conventional grammatical norms are themselves only monological fictions, maintained by the monological ideology that is trained into us early on and enforced by Western linguistics, imposed by that ideology onto the cre- ative interaction of real speakers in order to min- imize innovation, inadvertent or deliberate. “Or- dinary dialogical language” has always been the other in Western language theory, the uncontrolled and possibly uncontrollable locus of creativity that the monological tradition has always sought to bring to heel-Derrida to the contrary, of course, who says that writing is the other and speech is the logocentric favorite.’ But that has only been true of idealized speech: divine speech, speech as the speaking of the all-creating Logos, borne on the breath of God. It has never been true of real speech, what people actually say; real speech has never interested logocentrists, not even contempo- rary logocentric linguists (discourse analysts, say), who are not interested in what people say, but what idealized (monologized) patterns they can ex- tract from what people say.8

Interestingly, Evan Carton, who promises only

37

t o elucidate American romance, sheds more light on monologue and dialogue in Poe in passing than Frieden does in his entire chapter. Here is the kind of thing Frieden should have been writing, for ex- ample, from Carton:

It may strike us that the relation between mesmerist and subject, &s described here, mirrors Poe’s relation to many of his deathly and supersensitized visionaries and suggests, as well, his desired relation to his readers. The mesmerist may be seen as a type of the manipu- lative artist, ironically detached even at the height of his apparent involvement with his subject, which many readers (those who have not taken him for the obsessed visionary) have taken Poe to be. (p. 63)

This lays the groundwork for a study of genius and monologue in Poe. As does this: Indeed, “The Colloquy of Monos and Una,” whose ini- tial interrogative-“Born again?”-suggests the confla- tion of baffled infancy and spiritual transcendence, be- trays its own pretense to linguistic viability in the names of its principals; the indifferentiation of Monos from Una challenges the need and the possibility of the di- alectic upon which colloquy, and language itself, de- pends. Una’s early voice, always echoing or anticipa- tory, soon yields entirely to Monos, and the colloquy becomes a monologue. (pp. 79-80)

Carton’s project in The Rhetoric of Ameri- can Romance might, m I suggested earlier, be de- scribed as an attempt to rewrite Richard Chase’s The American Novel and Its Tradition (which is to say, to rewrite Frye on American literature) via DerridaQ-an Americanized, yalized and johnshop- kinsized Derrida, of course. Derrida’s absence is everywhere present in Carton’s argument:

Emerson’s sentence [the last from ‘Experience”] finally yields no epistemological claim for romance, although it initially appears to be proceeding toward one, nor does it deliver the eschatology that it has certainly heralded. ‘Genius,” in the end, does not unite with essence but is transformed, instead, into “practical power.” And power is potency, or potential, which implies transfor- mation while it defers realization [that’s vintage Der- rida, of course, la difldrance]. Romance, in Emerson’s construction, foretells a potential transformation and harbors a transformative potency: it dwells, that is, in possibility, in dialectical process or self-conscious quest. Its crucial difference from Spirit . . . is that it dwells, ineluctably, in language. (p. 4)

Expression, then, the poet’s single means to realize and possess an elusive inspiration, inevitably thwarts its own purpose, distorts or destroys its originating im- pulse, and substantiates only loss. (p. 44)

Still, Carton does not do t o his chosen texts what so many American deconstructors d o to theirs, reduce them inexorably to the same tire-

some image of self-contradiction, their rhetoric t o the same trope of inversion. As he sets u p his intertextual passage through the works of Dick- inson, Emerson, and Poe in P a r t One (too com- plex, in the best tradition of deconstruction, t o summarize), and then turns t o Hawthorne in P a r t Two, the different authors remain distinguishable, even (though sometimes just barely) recognizable in terms of older readings. Carton deconstructs texts, bu t he does not deconstruct them to death- t o gray anonymity. One might even say he re- tains some sense of writerly personality-that de- spised bourgeois fiction for orthodox deconstruc- tionists. Or, perhaps, rather, the notion that the major writers of the American Renaissance were all proto-deconstructors has become so orthodox that Carton does not have to argue it any more, but instead can narrow in on their divergent decon- structive gifts, their various talents for distorting and destroying and so on. For example,

Poe’s fiction, then, resists definition as a method of fill- ing or of emptying the category of the real, a mode that establishes truth as its origin and end or one that obliterates the notions of origin and end and enshrines pure artifice in the void [orthodox essentialist and de- constructive readings, respectively]. Rather, it is an ex- pression of and a response to the amalgamation of truth and artifice that Eureka identifies as the world’s origi- nating and informing principle: the necessarily deriva- tive and ‘abnormal” (xvi, 210, 263) representation of God. . . . Poe’s universe is permeated by truth but is constituted as fiction. (p. 134)

That strikes me as being right on the money. Car- ton reads deconstructively, bu t not dogmatically; he is willing t o allow Poe some vestige of historical otherness.

I will not summarize his readings of Poe tales; let me just say that they are almost always “new” readings, and that “newness” in his interpretive practice does not mean facile ingenuity, as it too often does in the most dogmatic of deconstruction- ists, but rather surprising and persuasive link-ups with American cultural and intellectual trends of Poe’s day (as in Irwin, whom Carton does not cite either). His reading of William Wilson as “Poe’s foremost exemplar of the self-reliant Emer- sonian individual, t he creative sayer (and writer) who would enjoy a wholly original relation t o the universe” (p. 36), is a case in point; but he does “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Loss of Breath,” “The Oval Portrait,” and “The Man T h a t Was Used Up” equally well, with constant flashes of insight, constant turns tha t open up new perspectives on much-read tales, or t ha t open interpretive avenues into little-read tales like “Loss of Breath” and “The Man That

38

Was Used Up.” Other readings of Poe tales- “The Domain of Arnheim” and “Landor’s Cot- tage,’ “Ligeia”-did not seem to me quite as inter- esting and fruitful, but that may just be a matter of personal preference; the book in any case is full of exciting material for Poe scholars, as for scholars of the American Renaissance in general.

My one serious criticism of Carton’s book is that it is a t least implicitly sexist, that it remains uncritical of the male-dominated canon that en- shrines a certain kind of complexity (which we have recently learned to call self-deconstruction) as the definitive criterion for inclusion among the great works. I say this diffidently, since I a m aware that my own American Apocalypses commits the same sin: the pill neither book can swallow is a writer like Harriet Beecher Stowe, who simply does not fit into the canonical construction of a self-conscious “mainstream” American Renaissance, and so must be spit out. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is both an Ameri- can romance and an American apocalypse, but it is nat a proto-deconstruction, so neither Carton nor I could say anything about it. It is propagandistic, it is sentimental, and it is written by a woman, to and for women. So i t is out: unserious, unmajor, unimportant.” I could not find a mediatory icon in it, and Carton certainly could not find his brand of high-powered self-deconstructing romance in it.

Again I return to my old plaint: Derrida. has been dogmatized so readily in recent years because he is ultimately not a particularly radical thinker, ultimately not substantially critical of metaphys- ical tradition; in fact, he rather seems to like it, to feel a t home in it, like mistletoe in the oak tree (to invoke the parasite metaphor deconstruc- tors and their detractors alike promote).“ Derrida is a brilliant, exciting parasite on the metaphysi- cal tradition, which is also the analytical, rational, logical tradition, which is also, I would claim, the patriarchal tradition of Western discourse. Cer- tainly there is nothing in dogmatic deconstruction that would encourage a recognition of the sexism of one’s analysis; analysis, after all, is analysis, the way things are done, the way thoughts are thought, the way sense is made of things in the West. The way, the unified, universal, transcendental, mono- logical way, which is to say, men’s way, or rather Man’s way, the way of Man, that depersonalized patriarchal ideal.

Am I making too much of a small point? To judge from recent feminist critiques of the theory industry, no. Why is it, as so many feminists have insisted, that the tolerant pluralistic atmosphere of current theoretical debate is intolerant only of feminism? Could it be because feminism i s truly radical, does offer real alternatives to the monolog-

ical tradition whose impossibility Derrida and his legions are so content monologically to iterate? Be- cause feminists are urging their colleagues to step out of the old intellectual ways and means, to stop being satisfied with the old games (which get more and more self-conscious but, as long as they are all defined monologically, do not really change), to look around a t the personal/political reality around (and in) them that their analysis-generated structures had concealed from their view?

In this sense, to move from Carton’s Rhetoric of American Romance to Ross Chambers’ Story and Situation is to jump from the fat into the fire. What Carton does, he does well. No matter what our opinion of monological deconstruction, Carton puts it t o good use. Chambers seems very much out of his depth. He is working in the structural- ist tradition, back in the transitional mode of the sixties, in fact, back in that time when structural- ism first began to gesture toward semiotics and Rezeptionsisthetik and to be transmogrified into deconstruction. Here is a fairly typical passage: “If readability (or interpretability) is the power lit- erary texts have of producing meanings, a power achieved by virtue of the reification of literary dis- course into ‘text,’ then seduction is the inevitable means by which the alienated text achieves value by realizing its potential of readability” (p. 13). Literary texts, which Chambers reifies as active agents, possess a potentiai essence or power called readability, and they actualize tha t potential by se- ducing the reader-or rather, by harboring a tex- tual feature that seduces whatever reader happens to come along.

Chambers’ approach is, of course, vaguely reminiscent of half a dozen more or less recent theoretical trends-especially, perhaps, Wolfgang Iser’s notion of the implied reader from the mid- seventies12-and it seems to be Chambers’ inten- tion to synthesize much of what has been said on several theoretical fronts into a coherent, inclusive system (the old monological ideal: a single expla- nation for all the facts, one truth, one word, mono- logos). In order to do that, of course, he has to introduce a new distinction or two, along with the new terms that distinguish his distinctions from everybody else’s distinctions. Chambers is an un- abashed dualist, structuralist, analyst, and would- be empiricist (on page 28 he wonders how “repre- sentative” his “corpus” is) who firmly believes that there are two kinds of everything; he proliferates oppositions like nobody’s business. (There are two kinds of people: those who say there are two kinds of people, and those who do not.) Having rede- fined Barthes’ distinction between “readerly” and “writerly” texts in his own rather opaque way (the

39

old argument that analysis is necessary for clarity’s sake always seemed to me a bit fishy: who can keep straight all those finer and ever finer distinctions analytical thinkers typically go in for?), he goes on to distinguish between literary and nonliter- ary discourse, narrative and narratorial authority, duplicitous and self-designating narration, narra- tional and figural embedding, and so on.

Chambers goes on for forty pages before he gets down to showing what his oppositions can do to texts. Pure theory first, the structure of real- ity in the abstract, and only then the descent t o the slum of practical interpretations. It takes a hardcore theory freak to keep reading.

But then there are plenty of those to go around. That I am not one is probably not Chambers’ fault. He is “normal,” plugged into the monolog- ical norms of the West; I a m the deviant one and probably should apologize for not liking his book. But I do not think I will. (In fact, I kept rubbing my eyes and glancing back at the first words I read about this book, Wlad Godzich’s opening lines in his foreword to it: “ROSS Chambers is a critic of modest pretensions: Eschewing the current tone of theoretical pronouncements, he prefers t o ana- lyze the way in which stories make their point” [p. xi]. If this is modesty, God save us from critical arrogance.)

Very briefly, what Chambers is trying to do is to open up structuralist narrative theory to the “transaction” between the writer and the reader, which he reductively images as seduction. (Do texts only seduce?) This transaction might be thought of as a dialogue between real people, writer and reader, except that that would be rather unscientific, real people being unstable variables that science has never felt very comfortable with. (Nor has any logical metaphysics, for that matter: it is no coincidence that Plato gave us both dialec- tical logic and the first great totalitarian utopia. The logical attempt to stabilize all variables always implies and ultimately demands conformity to the robot ideal.) In other words, because Chambers wants to remain a structuralist, he has to bring the transaction into the text-has to reify inten- tional and interpretive acts as textual facts.13 Thus he yields literary transaction as pure structure, no messy, chaotic unpredictable people-which is, of course, right where the structuralist wants t o be.

Chambers devotes his third chapter (first in- terpretive chapter) t o an analysis of “The Pur- loined Letter,” which, it will surprise no one t o learn, he comes to via Lacan and Derrida.14 His thesis, as he summarizes it himself, is that “Du- plicity versus self-reference as artistic modes form the very substance of ‘The Purloined Letter’ when

one chooses to read it in terms of narratorial au- thority, and as a text concerned with its own il- locutionary situation” (p. 53)-which of course neatly shazams interpretive choice into textual substance, a move typical of the book. “Illocution- ar y situation” ( “ i 11 o cu t io n ar y r el at i o ns h i ps” and the like) is a term Chambers never defines; he seems to assume that i t is semantically transpar- ent or ~nprob1ematic . l~ The chapter is substan- tially a restatement of the Lacan-Derrida debate in terms of Chambers’ coinages, which do allow him to dissociate, for example, the duplicity of Dupin’s narration from the self-referentiality of the general narration-which I suppose is a good thing to have done, if one cares about such matters.

My problem is, I guess, that I do not. Cham- bers has written his book for people who actually believe in Barthes and Benveniste and the rest, and his Poe chapter for people who believe that the Lacan-Derrida debate is the seminal statement of the story’s key issues. People who believe-not think, or assume, or suppose, but believe, doctri- nally. Chambers is working in a dogmatic tra- dition; (post)structuralist semiotics is not one of many straitjackets t o strap reality into but the truth, normal science, a representation of the uni- verse whose reliability is not even in question. For someone who shares those preconceptions, Cham- bers’ book may have something t o offer, new in- sights, useful new critical tools. For me, it was just more of the same.

Jefferson Humphries’ Metamorphoses of the Raven both is and is not more of the same. Humphries too works in an institutionalized de- constructive tradition, but he is too much the Reb (in the best sense of that word) to work in it slavishly. I have never seen anybody explain the French Poe the way he does, or rather the translational interchange between France and the South, Poe to Baudelaire to MallarmC to Valdry to Faulkner and Tate to Appollinaire and RenC Char, and so on. If Carton’s book was The American Novel and Its Tradition rewritten with an eye on Derrida, Humphries’ book is The French Face of Edgar Poe rewritten with an eye on Derrida, La- can, and Harold Bloom.“ And like Carton’s book, when this one works, it really works. The tropic creativity of translation is a wonderful tool for ex- plaining what happens when Poe crosses the At- lantic and then returns, half a century later, trans- mogrified in weird and uncanny ways. (One of the things Humphries offers is the makings of a totally new theory of translation, one tha t is no longer dedicated to norms of equivalence; unfortunately, he does not take it much past the makings stage.)

But Humphries is not only a Reb-he is a

40

Southerner, and not only a rebellious one. When he says that ‘an adapted and modified Lacanian paradigm will provide a theoretical framework for the readings that follow” (p. 4), he does not mean “paradigm” in the linguistic sense he gives in the glossary, he means “paradigm” in the Kuhnian sense: he is doing normal science, testing and expanding on the paradigm generated by Lacan, the revolutionary ~ c i e n t i s t . ’ ~ It is Lacan’s Schema L, from the e‘crit on the treatment of psychosis,18 which Humphries transforms ingeniously (p. 28):

This point is really the main one he wants to make, and if you look at it long enough, the schema does make a lot of sense. It opens up new per- spectives on Poe and the French. It is good, a useful critical device. Out of Poe’s problematic re- lationship with both his own Northern birth and the country’s cultural topheaviness, or Northheav- iness, is born a new Southern literature that en- gages the French symbolists in ways that Emerson never could; and the dotted line back from the French to Poe suggests something of the power of retroactive literary history, or what Harold Bloom calls the necessity of misreading.lg Once Baude- laire and Mallarm6 have taught us to misread Poe as they did, he no longer is merely the Poe of Rich- mond, Virginia; he is also the French Poe, whom Humphries, coming out of Bloom, can explain as Quinn, coming out of historicism, could not.

The only problem I have with Humphries’ schema is that he rather egregiously overuses it. It is provocative, interesting, even exciting, the first time you see it; after he has sprung it on you for the tenth and then the hundredth time, over and over again, i t begins to pall. In fact, the schema is rather like the raven that marks the beginning of each chapter:20 the schema comes t o mark the end of an interpretation and the advent of a new text, to have a semiotic rather than a represen- tative function. And because he does not bother to comment on how he has put each schema to- gether, it becomes a kind of game that the reader is invited to play-try to figure out what I am try- ing to say in this one or, if you do not feel like

playing, just move on to the next interpretation. Sometimes the point has already been made, and the schema is superfluous; sometimes the point is embedded only in the schema, and the reader is left to construct the point any which way (these are the enjoyable ones).

It may not need saying, but Humphries does not say much about Poe, qua Poe-about the writ- ings conceived in terms of New-Critical autonomy, or about the writer conceived as a historical per- sonage, a man who happened to live in a certain place and time, the old, boring, predeconstruc- tive approaches to literature. In principal, anyway, his approach is intertextual; what has been done with Poe on both sides of the Atlantic, in France and in the South. I say in principle, because only Poe and his first French readers (Baudelaire, espe- cially) are really treated intertextually; Humphries soon slides back into rhetorical analyses of indi- vidual American and French texts that continue the tradition in some way. Even the Lacanian schemata soon become mere tools of textual analy- sis, charts for the symbolic and other “structures” of the texts he examines. It is hard to hold onto the “purity” of the intertextual project as it is pursued by, say, Harold Bloom. All too soon, despite all the high-powered terminology, despite ever fancier and finer distinctions, despite ingenious diagrams, things start sliding back into New Criticism.

Of course, as any deconstructor worth his or her puns knows, that ideal of purity is itself sus- pect. But what in place of purity? Impurity as the new purity? What does that mean? What else is there?

My own suggestion is that we start looking past the monological inscription that teaches us the importance of purity, unity, clarity, and econ- omy, a t the messiness and the unpredictable polit- ical and personal power of real speech. For me, recently, that means writing in dialogue-when the norns will let me. For Rachel Blau DuPlessis, it means writing collectively, in fragments. For Joanna Rum, i t means blurring the old Cartesian distinctions between fiction and non-fiction, sub- jectivity and objectivity. For Susan Griffin, Robin Morgan, and a host of other feminist innovators, i t means writing in a wide range of personal voices, styles, and forms, whatever best seems to elicit the richness of an experience, the intensity of an anger or a love.21 What do you think? Any ideas?

Douglas Robinson University of Tumpere

41

Notes

Stein, “Composition as Explanation,” in Look at Me Now and Here I Am: Writings and Lecture8 1909- 45, ed. Patricia Meyerowitz (1967; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984), pp. 21-30.

American Apocalypses: The Image of the End of the World in American Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985).

Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Scene8 from the Drama of European Literature, trans. Ralph Mannheim (New York: Meridian Books, 1959), pp. 11-76.

White, Metahietory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hop- kins Univ. Press, 1971); and Northrop Frye, “Theory of Myths,” in A n Anatomy of Criticism: Four Eeaays (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957). ‘ Mea culpa, here, on two counts. I originally wrote this review essay dialogically, in order to enact the point I was trying to make discursively-and the piece was sent back to be rewritten monologically, not be- cause there is anything inherently wrong with dialogue, of course, but because my dialogue sacrificed clarity to complexity, decorum to abrasiveness, scholarly credibil- ity to personal intensity. But let me cite the reader that Poe Studies sent my (solicited) essay to: “No matter how sympathetic a reader might be with Robinson’s an- tipathy to institutionalized monologue and the motives that lead him to make this subversive gesture with his dialogic form, the gesture itself is too weak to be worth the sacrifice of clarity and economy on several counts: 1) It is easily dismissable as simply ‘too obvious,’ ‘too cute.’ He runs the risk of not being read-which, pre- sumably, he wants to avoid,” and so on. Yes, anything that does not knuckle under to institutionalized norms of monological clarity does run the risk of not being read; therefore, let us by all means avoid rocking the boat. So I am guilty of rocking the boat (with this note, here, though no longer dialogically). More than that, I am guilty of what the existentialists used to call bad faith: monologically criticizing Frieden for mono- logically elucidating the impossibility of monologue- which is why I had to include this note. Submitting to being muzzled can still be productive if you leave signs of a struggle.

This may be the place to note that Frieden has not done his homework on Poe and Poe criticism. Not only has he not read John Irwin’s American Hieroglyph- ice (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980) and the other deconstructions of Poe relevant to his chapter-indeed he has hardly read anything on Poe. The only sources he cites are David Halliburton, Edgar Allan Poe: A Phe- nomenological View (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973) and a piece by John Carlos Rowe, “Writing and Truth in Poe’s ‘Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,’” Glyph, 2 (1977), 102-121. He covers writers like Plato and Philo and Shakespeare better, but even there most of his secondary sources are from the fifties and sixties. In fact, of his ninety-three secondary sources, only two were published after 1980; only twelve after 1975; only

twent six after 1970-strange in a 1985 book. ‘see especially Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1976), Part I.

See, for example, R. M. Coulthard, A n Zntroduc- tion to Diecouree Analysis (London: Longman, 1977); W. Edmondson, Spoken Discouree: A Model for Anal- yeie (London: Longman, 1981); or Lauri Carlson, Dia- logue Gamee: A n Approach to Discourse Analysia (Dor- drecht: D. Reidel, 1983).

Chase, The American Novel and Its Tradition (1957; rpt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980).

lo I am thinking, of course, of recent feminist rereadings of “classic” or “canonical” American liter- ature and its long history of excluding women, espe- cially women who, like Stowe, are sentimental or prop- agandistic. See especially Jane Tompkins, ‘Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Politics of Liter- ary History,” in Elaine Showalter, ed., The New Fem- inist Criticism: Eeaays on Women, Literature, and Theory (New York: Pantheon Books, 1985), pp. 81- 104; and, more generally, Nina Baym’s “Melodramas of Beset Manhood: How Theories of American Fic- tion Exclude Women Authors,” pp. 63-80 in Showal- ter; and Joanna Rum, How to Suppress Women’s Writ- ing (Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 1983). One gets quite a different picture of “American Romance” read- ing Carton’s book and, say, Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Litera- ture (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1983).

l1 See, for example, J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host,” in Harold Bloom et al., Deconetruction and Criticism (New York: Continuum, 1979), pp. 217-253; and Jacques Derrida, “Limited Inc abc . . . ,” trans. Samuel Weber, Glyph, 2 (1977), 162-254.

l2 See Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aes- thetic Response (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1978).

l3 This move, of course, is made by all “scientific” thinkers, for whom all “unanalyzed” (read unidealized, undepersonalized, unstabilized) matter is anathema. It is also, interestingly enough, the move repeatedly made by the supposedly phenomenological reception theorist Chambers relies heavily on, Wolfgang Iser, who is actu- ally more of a structural positivist than a phenomenol- ogist. I discuss he r in these terms in my “Reader’s Power, Writer’s Power: Barth, Bergonzi, Iser, and the Modern-Postmodern Period Debate,” Criticiem, 28 (1986), 307-322. Norman Holland’s transactional the- ory of reader response offers a useful counterpoint to these scientific reifications; see, for example, “A Trans- active Account of Transactive Criticism,” Poetics, 7 (1978), 177-189, or “Literature as Transaction,” in Paul Hernadi, ed., What is Literature? (Bloomington: Indi- ana Univ. Press, 1978), pp. 206-218.

l4 See Jacques Lacan, ‘Seminar on ‘The Purloined Letter,’” Yale French Studies, 48 (1973), 39-72; and Jacques Derrida, “The Purveyor of Truth,” Yale French Studies, 52 (1975), 31-113. For an excellent discussion

4 2

of both readings, see Barbara Johnson, “The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida,” Yale French Studies, 55-56 (1977), 457-505; rpt. in her The Critical Difer- ence: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 110- 146.

l5 I take it Chambers is using “illocutionary” to at least gesture toward a speech-act approach to lan- guage, an approach that stresses not the structure of language but what people are trying to do in saving something. The term is, of course, J. L. Austin’s from How to Do Things with Words, rev. ed (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980). Austin talks of the “illocutionary force” of an utterance; the usual terms for what Cham- bers calls the “illocutionary situation” (if I understand him right) are “speech situation” or “language-use sit- uation.” If an “illocutionary relationship” means any- thing, it must mean a relationship between people, peo- ple doing things to each other with words, as opposed to an abstract structural relationship between concepts.

But as I see it, that real relationship is precisely what Chambers the structuralist cannot touch (analy- sis by definition always discards reality early on as “un- analyzed matter”). Another way of saying the same thing might be that Chambers follows John Searle in Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1969), and Emile Benveniste in ProblLmes de linguistique generale (Paris: Gallimard, 1960 and 1974) in reducing speech acts from what people actually do to each other in real dialog- ical situations to textually controlled (or controllable) speech act types, abstract analytical (monological) pat- terns. To do so, of course, guts the rhetorical force of Austin’s theory: “illocutionary” as Austin’s “follow- ers” beginning with Searle use it refers not to what a real person tries to do with a word in a real situation (which cannot be “known,” that is, empirically stabi- lized, experimentally controlled, and so lies beyond the analytical pale) but the abstract function of the word in the null context (a clever coinage by which formal linguists make no context seem like the purest context of all). For an excellent discussion of this idealization of Austin by his followers, see Shoshana Felman, The Literary Speech-Act: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Languages, trans. Catherine Porter (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 198s).

l6 Patrick F. Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1957).

l7 See Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Reoolutions, rev. ed. (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970).

l8 Lacan, “On a Question Preliminary to Any Pos- sible Treatment of Psychosis,” in Alan Sheridan, trans. gcrite: A Selection (New York: W. W. Norton, 1977), p. 193. Lacan’s “L” is actually shaped like a “Z”: it starts off with the subject in the top lefthand corner, sets up a dialectic between the subject and the other- small-o or other person in the top righthand corner, which then generates what Lacan diagrams as o-prime, the image of self generated in the specular relation

with the other-small-0, back on the subject’s side, in the bottom lefthand corner. The final dialectic is be- tween o-prime and the Other-capital-0 in the bottom righthand corner (the unconscious, in one simplifica- tion; whatever it is in all relations that “speaks US”).

In Humphries’ modification of the schema, the sub- ject becomes any (X), the other-small-o becomes the “symmetrical other,” o-prime becomes the “symmet- rical self,” and the Other-capital-0 becomes the “het- erogenous other” (p. 28). Humphries’ and Lacan’s point is to move beyond symmetrical dialectics (which Lacan derogates as “imaginary”) into the complicated (criss- crossing fourway) dialectics of the “symbolic.” Where two of you are gathered, there are always two more, your specular image and the shadowy Other. Humphries also draws another line, from the “heterogenous other” back to the (X) (which in fact turns the “Z” into an “X”), a dotted line, implying that there is no real road back through here, but that the (X)’s unstated and unstat- able dialectical relationship with the heterogenous other somehow conditions our understanding of it.

l9 The phrase “necessity of misreading” is the ti- tle of the concluding chapter in Bloom’s Kabbalah and Criticism (New York: Seabury Press, 1975); see also A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975).

2o Or, for that matter, like the use of the maroon paper off of the Mabbott edition of Poe in Humphries’ dustjacket, whose semiosis seems designed to read: this is a central, seminal Poe Book.

21 See Rachel Blau DuPlessis, “For the Etruscans,” in Showalter, ed. Feminist Criticism, pp. 271-291; Joanna Rum, The Female Man (New York: Bantam, 1975); the essays and book extracts Susan Griffin has collected in Made from This Earth: Selections from Her Writing (London: Women’s Press, 1982); and Robin Morgan, The Anatomy of Freedom (New York: An- chor Press/Doubleday, 1982). Do you suppose there is any connection between the Poe Studies reader’s claim that my dialogical experiment was too “weak” to jus- tify the sacrifice of clarity and economy (see n. 5) and the age-old patriarchal characterization of women as the “weaker” sex? “Strong,” of course, is defined in “nor- mal,” monological, patriarchal terms.

43