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Avant-garde criticism: The criticism of exhaustion

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Avant-garde criticism: The criticism of exhaustion

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Content AVANT-GARDE CRITICISM:
THE CRITICISM OF EXHAUSTION
by
Patricia Blinde
A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(Comparative Literature)
September 1977
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
T H E G R A D U A T E S C H O O L
U N IV E R S IT Y P A R K
L O S A N G E L E S . C A L IF O R N IA 9 0 0 0 7
This dissertation, written by
Patrici.a__Blind.e................
under the direction of /i.ex.. Dissertation C om
mittee, and approved by all its members, has
been presented to and accepted by The Graduate
School, in partial fu lfillm e n t of requirements of
the' degree of
D O & T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y
D ean
Date 0ct°ker 18, 1977
DISSERT. COM M ITTEE
Chairman
C O
*78
BfeHS
<=gS/ZtQ
UMI Number: DP22534
All rights reserved
INFORMATION TO ALL USERS
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and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed,
a note will indicate the deletion.
D issertatio n P u b lish in g
UMI DP22534
Published by ProQuest LLC (2014). Copyright in the Dissertation held by the Author.
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FOR PHILIPPA—ANN
. . . a tiny accomplishment for
so much lost.
With love.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART ONE
CHAPTER
1. THE TURNING POINT ...................... 1
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER 1 ...................... 34
2. DISCOURSE OFF C O U R S E ........................ 39
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER 2 ...................... 72
3. THE AVANT-GARDE CONSCIOUSNESS ............... 76
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER 3 ......................... 105
PART TWO - IHAB HASSAN
4. V I S I O N ...........................................109
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER 4 ......................... 144
5. EXECUTION: AN ALTERNATIVE........... 149
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER 5 ......................... 184
6. CONCLUSION...................................... 189
FOOTNOTES TO CONCLUSION ...................... 197
BIBLIOGRAPHY 19 8
PART ONE
CHAPTER 1
i
| THE TURNING POINT
*
In the relatively short span of a decade or so,
I
Structuralism has not only made itself felt in American
circles of literary criticism'*' but has (perhaps more impor
I tantly so) raised the question as to the function and
i
i 2
I raison d1etre of the literary critic. The problem m -
I volved in perceiving the literary text as an essentially
| closed system of linguistic signs whose explanations may
j be arrived upon via systematic examination has, since the
I
; works of Foucault and Derrida m particular, been super-
j seded by Derrida's redefinition of literature and the con-
j sequent detachment of literature and literary theory from
their moorings in philosophy and metaphysics.
In the wake of such a reorientation of perspec-
I
j tives, the student of literature is thus faced less with
| the feasibility of methods as regards their applications
; to given texts than with the approach a reading subject
i
‘ (armed now with a new set of directions and corresponding
| values) must take in his/her confrontation with the liter-
' ary text. According to Derrida, the first "rupture,"
: as he terms it, from traditional perspectives came:
1
At the moment when a de-centering had come
about: at the moment when European culture— and,
in consequence, the history of metaphysics of its
concepts— had been dislocated, driven from its
locus, and forced to stop considering itself as
the culture of reference.3
j In terms of language and literature, the realization of
t decentralization came with the discovery of "the structur-
4
ality of structure," where the attempt to apprehend the
1 structural aspect of the object before them scientifically
j led structuralist critics to the creation of their own
J thought grids. In other words, "they had to set up a
| model of relationships that could account for the distri-
5
; bution and interactions of the components of the text."
i
j For the structuralist, Derrida notes, clarifica-
j tion via an unveiling of the layers which constituted the
. object before them could, paradoxically, be accomplished
only by the imposition of yet another structure, namely,
the critic’s own metalanguage. As such, the undertaking
may well be considered an "activity" since it is " . . .a
veritable fabrication of a world which resembles the pri-
| mary one" although its aim is not to copy the primary,
g
' object but "... render it intelligible." The rupture
i
! that Derrida speaks of is then the realization that any
I
I human thought system is, in fact, "repetition in all
!
- senses of the word" and that such a realization tends to
i initiate, where literature and literary criticism are
concerned, inquiry as to the nature of literature and the
principles surrounding the concept of its being a self-
centered whole imbued with certain truth values.
Such a perspective, according to Derrida, is
: rooted in what he terms the "logocentricism" of western
' metaphysics and does not take into consideration what
i Derrida sees as the "textuality" of the literary text,
I
! that is, the referential nature of systems of discourse.
j As part of an autonomous culture, literature, specifically,
|
j has always been subjected to norms "and presents the attri-
I
I 7
; butes of the relatxve and the particular." As a system
1 of signification, literature, or its merits, has tended to
be established on the location of a center or a "truth"
I arising from the opposition of the "sensible" and the
j "intelligible" aspects of the linguistic signs. For the
! "classic way," as Derrida tells us, consists "in reducing
j
! or deriving the signifier, that is to say ultimately in
I
‘ 8
{ submitting the sign to thought." Every sign employed
t
j in a system of signification, in other words, is centered
I
| to a thought already laid down which consequently dictates
its "proper" usage. In turn, every network of signs, such
: as literature, already belongs in a sense to a pre-existing
"thought," and every newly created piece is measured
against, or in terms of, an a priori "master" text.
I
\
In both De la grammatologie and the essay "Differ-
ance," Derrida posits the principle of the "instituted
9
trace" in systems of signification. In this principle,
Derrida sees that an existing system's temporal and spacial
distance from the system from which it derives its ontology
must be sensed, for it is in perceiving the relational
aspect of systems of signification that one arrives at
the realization of the dialectical nature of systems.
"Each concept," he states, "each term carries within it
the principle of its own death.But the existence of
a secondary system is always ensured in this diachrony.
t
I On these terms, written discourse can no longer
* be sustained by the metaphysical determination of its be-
I
| ing an independent whole, whose presence indicates, if not
its essential "beingness," at least a primary "beingness"
' or source of truth located somewhere outside the descrip-
I tion of the written text. To such an assumption, Derrida
| states that "... the original or transcendental signi-
' fied [however] is never absolutely present outside a sys-
l
11
1 tern of differences" and that such an absence, if real-
, ized, is crucial in that it " . . . extends the domain
• 12
: and interplay of signification ad infinitum." A written
i
. text's "focus" is thus impossible to locate and the aims
j of traditional criticism to define a text's center in
i
' order to render it intelligible in:terras of its component
parts cannot really be accomplished. As Donato points out,
"interpretation then is nothing but sedimenting one layer
of language upon another to produce an illusory depth which
I 13
j gives us a temporary spectacle of things beyond words."
To a large extent, the misapprehension as to a
J text's "centeredness" is linked to the traditional view
j
i of the referential nature of language and the traditional
i
; lack of consideration as to its differential nature. On
I
i
j the basis of Saussure's contention concerning the arbitrary
j nature of the sign (that is, its bearing no relationship
| to its inferent), Derrida establishes that:
. . . the possibility of conceptuality depends
i upon a silent system of differential references:
j one concept refers to another in their differ-
! ence; one signifier refers to another in their
I differences.14
I
In such an exchange, no point of origin may be indicated:
the origin to which a signifier refers is created only as
the signifier encounters another and, consequently, in a
written text, "there is never an interpretandum which is
»
J not already an interpretans. " ^Even the meaning of a
I linguistic unit, the word, Todorov reminds us, does not,
j finally, point to its referent in reality alone (thereby
i
i
j indicating an origin of sorts) but has to be " . . . de
fined by the combinations in which it can accomplish its
I
j linguistic function." Additionally, Todorov states that
the meaning of any word "is the entirety of its possible
5
relationships with other words," that is, the measure to
| which it differs from other words within the system of
| which it is a part.^
1 As a linguistic complex, the literary text, like
the word, resists the nomination of being and, consequently,
' can "... no longer be considered an object . . . for
17
' dissection of knowledge, idolatory or clarification."
For that matter, a text viewed from the Derridian perspec-
<
‘ tive cannot even have, to use Martin Buber's phrase, an
! 18
■ "identification with the insensible It." In any system
i
- of signification where one signifier merges with or points
; to other signifiers, there is the absence of a center that
^ makes for the realization that it is impossible to live,
19
as Barthes put it, outside the infinite text. Thus,
I somewhat ironically, the Structuralists, culminating with
j Derrida's observations, have first led us to see the struc-
i
J turation in systems of signification, then employed their
own structures or codes as means of decoding these systems
| only to discover that no structures (that is, definitive
I
| units or wholes) in fact "exist" in a system such as writ-
| i n < 3 •
1
! Instead of static form, Derrida's redefinition of
i the text and, in particular, his notion of textuality,
!
!
| offer a concept of the written word that may perhaps be
! likened to the amoeba with its pseudopodic locomotions
!
6
that tend to locate center(s) only as it confronts a
parallel set of locomotions that are emitted by another
confronting subject. The fact that Derrida denies the
existence of "perception" does not necessarily imply that
t
: permutations and transformations in systems of significa-
I
tion do not occur. In articulating his concept of textu-
: ality in terms of the trace, Derrida asserts that:
The trace is not a presence but is rather
the simulcrum of a presence that dislocates, dis-
| places, and refers beyond itself. The trace has,
; properly speaking, no place, for effacement be-
I longs to the very structure of the trace . . .
j effacement establishes the trace of a change of
! . place and makes it disappear in its appearing. 20
1
I
It is the phenomenological concept of perception
: which Derrida denies, the concept of perception as
, f
i
j " . . .an intuition or of a given originating from the f
■ t
j thing itself (i.e., a source or center) present in its
' meaning, independently from language."^ What is counten-
; anced instead is percept-ability, that is, the awareness
I
j as to the referential activity between mind and its own
; systems of traces and between text and its own textuality.
1
j In view of this, it is not the subject who perceives—
; although on a certain level of experience and human dis
course, Foucault concedes that it becomes impossible to
I
, get along without the notion of subject— but a question
I
| as to how the subject emerges from his/her systems, a
| question "of knowing where it comes from and how it
; 22
functions." This is a view that is m accordance with
Levi-Strauss1 attempts at transcending the distinction
between the "sensible" and the "intelligible" aspects of
I
: the sign by placing the self at the level of the sign,
thereby reconciling meaning and function in an activity
' that situates the subject in the midst of a reflective
and refractive engagement with the given text.
In the confrontation between reader and the text,
i lhab Hassan correctly assesses that a text is "created" as
! 2 3
( it is read, for in terms of textuality, both as it ap-
] plies to text and reader, not one but perhaps several ere-
I
j ated moments of the text/reader come into being only to
be effaced as new texts/readers emerge. The notion that
1 such a creation of text and reading subject is followed
by the succeeding destruction of text/reader will, undoubt
edly, provoke the same sort of criticism that schools
, (such as that of Poulet), which stress the primacy of a
j subjective consciousness, tend to leave themselves open
I to. The concept of textuality necessarily posits a read
ing subject: his/her primacy, however, is not established
| although his/her presence, which spells a subjective pres-
; ence, would be sufficient to raise the horror of a critic
like Riffaterre who speaks of "all the dangers Ithat] the
24
j subjectivity and mystical intuition entail." The whole
' point of objectivity, however, is geared toward the
: rendition of truth with regard to a literary work. Objec
tivity, or the concept of objectivity, thus suggests a
center to be located in a system of signification. It sees
the fact that linguistic signs refer to "things in them
selves" rather than to other linguistic signs, and conse-
i
quently it senses the "danger" of subjectivity in that the
i presence of a subject at the level of signs always tends
' toward the dislocation of the center. In conjunction with
I
| Derrida's eradication of the idea of underlying truths in
]
I any system, the favorite attack against the dangers of
i
1 subjectivity tends to become a moot point: there are no
; subjects or objects in the dialectics of reading. It may
even be said that:
| Subject is object: object is subject. Each
I is the aspect of the other (or, they are aspects
i of one another). As subject and object they are
I not (neither is): as subject-object, object-
I subject, they are— but, as such, that which they
I are is a suchness in the intemporal dimension
j (intemporality) . • That is why no thing, neither
, subject nor object, either is or is not, why any
j "things" neither is nor is not, why the Truth,
"that which is," is a double absence, the absence
of absence, or the absence of "is not" in Time,
i.e., in the temporal dimension at right angles
to the intemporal d i m e n s i o n . 25
Each confrontation with a literary text results in a con-
I tinuous dialectical flow that is touched off by the con
frontation itself and in no way ends with it or a report
of this encounter.
All representations of this confrontation are,
in a large sense, subjective interpretations since they
depend on the "who" who seizes whatever created "moments"
|
j of the text arise. As Foucault observed, interpretation
will "... always be an interpretation by the 'who'
i
■ since, in the final analysis, it is not "that which is in
I
j a signified" which comes under scrutiny, but "... the
j one 'who' has laid down the interpretation."^ But if the
j reading encounter is a dialectical engagement where the
i
j text itself has no ontology, the Derridian notion of textu-
1
I ality must imply, correspondingly, not a fixed or unified
subject, but a functioning subjectivity that, because it
operates on the level of the signs of the text, does not
I
| make objects of these signs. In the mysticism of the
j East, seeing objects or "the other" in terms of subjec
tivity amounts to the manifestation of the split-mind and
is not necessarily the actual objective Seeing of phenom
ena. On the other hand, a functioning subjectivity, which
is thought of as "pure seeing," is said to be "subjectivity
looking at itself" and is indistinguishable from objects,
signs, phenomena.
In the reading experience, Barthes speaks of con-
i notation as "... a determination, a relation, an ana-
I
! phora, a feature which has the power to relate itself to
I
! anterior, ulterior or exterior mentions, to the other
i
10
! 27
sites of the text." Barthes goes on to say that "we must
in no way restrain this relating," although he specifies
the fact that connotation cannot be confused with the more
random nature of association of ideas. The correlations
i
; that take place in connotation, according to Barthes, take
place because the ideas that arise from a confrontation
! with a text are immanent in the text itself. In the con-
i
i
1 notative activity of reading, the functioning subjectivity
j becomes a vital part of the act, for as Barthes puts it:
j . . . reading is not a parasitical act . . . it
: is a form of work . . . and the method of this
I work is topological: I am not hidden within the
i text. I am simply irrecoverable from it: my
| task is to- move, to shift systems whose perspec-
j tive ends neither at the text nor at the "I":
! in operational terms, the meanings I find are
! established not by "me" or by others, but by
j their systematic mark: there is no other proof
of reading than by the quality and endurance of
j its systematics: in other words than its func-
j tioning.28
i
j There is, both in Derrida's notion of textuality
i
j and in Barthes' articulation of a functioning subjectivity
!
j that is irrecoverable from the text, a shift from the
i
, traditional aim of criticism to engender truths. By em-
i phasizing function and drawing together the gap between
subject and object, Barthes and Derrida essentially effect
j a parallel to the Zen "leap" whereby there is a turning
r
j away from a perspective that tends to objectify (that is,
■ the perspective that tends towards the creation of
differences: the "I" as opposed to the non-I, subject as
opposed to object, etc.) to one that "subjectiyises." In
terms of criticism, the objectivising perspective has re
sulted in the distance that the traditional critic places
i
!
j
' between the book as object and him/herself, the reading
I subject. In this regard, the objectivising perspective
l
| may correctly be given the Zen term of the "phenomenal
r
I
! mind" in the sense that it is the perspective that thinks
in terms of phenomena and necessarily operates within di
mensional limitations. Eastern philosophy regards such
a perspective as operating along a "horizontal plane" as
! opposed to the "verticality" of a functioning subjectiv-
2 9
1 lty. Every perspective that begins with the considera-
i
j tion of the "I" (consequently, this automatically raises
I
I the notion of the non-I) is one that has to maintain the
j
j distinctions between the I and the non-I in all of its
i
1
| operations. This in itself constitutes the limitations
i
j of "horizontality" where the subject can either insist
j upon his/her difference from the object or must see him/
1 herself in the object. It is in this respect that Barthes
I
j senses the danger of criticism arising from the phenomenal
| orientation: for if the text is defined as "an expressive
' object," it can be "sublimated under a morality of truth,
i . 3 0
I in one instance laxist; in the other ascetic."
i The notion of the literacy critic as judge, high
i priest, or discerner of truth and meaning has been
12
possible only through the distinctions that have been
created between subject and the book as expressive object.
Correspondingly, a perspective that takes into considera-
! tion the notion of textuality or functional aspects of
' the text cannot give rise to a place for a judge or dis-
cerner of truth. Textuality resists interpretation, that
1 is, readings that are necessarily "objective" or "subjec-
j tive." The expressive object, on the other hand, is open
to a reduction to the intelligible, which is the attempt
at finding the "I" in a foreign object. Methodology, in
i this respect, becomes incriminated in the "effacement"
of a text: its procedures too are geared toward the hope
of finding the validity of their own existences in the
i . I
| primary text. By the same token, every method is a mam- |
i '
j festation of the distance between the reading subject and
the object of his/her concern. The aim of all methods
j is the enablement of objectivity, that is, the insurance
j against the presence of the subject in the reading enter-
i
J prise.
! Based on the dualistic subject/object orientation,
methodology attempts to "have it both ways," as it were:
S it wishes to find itself in the text and goes to great
I lengths at doing so, and it also mandates the objective
j distance that counters the elaborate procedures it draws
j up. In terms of this, formalism— "attention to that which
! 13
makes literature literature, the attempt to determine a
specificity of 'literariness,'" amounts to the assertion
31
of "that which makes literature literature" upon a text.
! The assertion will ensure the existence of form in the
|
text, but the procedures leading to the assertion, since
j they effect a delay of the assertion, allow for the sem-
! blance of "objective distance."
: In thematic approaches, the assertion of a removed
subject is no less evident, for like all conventional
criticism, thematicism too depends "on the notion of the
i
{ sign, of a signified (a meaning) Iwhich exists] behind
J 32
I the signifier and the pertinence of their opposition."
■ It remains for the reading subject in this instance to
j recover/insert the appropriate signified.
| The traditional distance that must be established
j
i between an object and its perceiving subject is a perspec-
(
j tive that has dominated critical thinking to the present
I
day. But since Derrida's deconstruction of criticism and
Foucault's "archeology of intellectual systems," the
subject/object dichotomy has simply been the western
world's adaptation to sorting out "so many different and
j similar things according to grills of similitude, identi-
j ties and analogies." The subject/object orientation
I is thus one "grille speculative" that philosophy has im-
I
i posed upon the critical enterprise, and the imposition
14
occurs upon the supposition that a verifiable truth under
lies every system of signification.
In terms of Derrida's re-evaluation of the text,
j and particularly in terms of his theory of difference, the
1 subject's search for signifieds in his/her object of study
I
gives way to, or rather invites, the interplay between
j the "I" with its own pluralities and the system of traces
in the text. The notion of the reader's own plurality
is crucial: plurality of the reader alone affords the
release of the multiplicity that constitutes the text.
The involvement (that is, the nondifferentiation between
| reader and text) of the reading subject allows for the
! production of spacial and temporal differences which are
necessary to, say, elicit a meaning from a word that is
capable of releasing a multiplicity of meanings depending
upon its place in a specific syntactical arrangement, the
blank intervention of space between itself and other words,
34
and so forth. In this respect, Derrida's concept of
I supplementarity, or "the movement of free play, permitted
I
I
by the lack, the absence of a center or origin" reinforces
i
; the perspective that sees the reading engagement as con-
!
i figurative conjunctions between aspects of the reader and
f
)
| aspects of the text. In the reading act, Derrida states
; that a "deficiency" is supplied— the text, in other words.,
i
: needs a reader whose activation of the text in turn con-
35
stitutes a "supplementing of something additional."
15
The concept of textuality is one that essentially
sees the mobile, multi-faceted aspect of reader-in-text,
text-in-reader and as such, the claims of authority, the
merit of one critical stance over another and the hunt for
I signifieds, have no place in relation to this concept.
{
| In Derrida's view, a body of criticism may itself be sub-
| jected to the "status" of a trace in the ever changing,
! ever extending chain of systems. Hence, every rendition
of a (?) subject's confrontation with the text-can be con
sidered valid and invalid in view of the fact that the
affirmation of textuality ascribes no valuations to the
reading engagement.
i
j The "crisis" that Derrida's perspective initiates
j is the problem of what to do with the written text: does
i
I the text need the literary critic as we have always known
j him/her in view of what we now know about thinking, and
! what we know about the text? Or must our assumptions as
i
t
to "why" the critic or "how" the critic be re-aligned?
t
| In his commentary on Derrida, Alan Bass suggests, by way
j of a first step away from the dictums of traditional
i
1 criticism, the confrontation with a text without reducing
I
I
j it to its "meanings" or signifieds. Bass, however, does
not precisely indicate what a "system" arising from
I Derrida's perspective might entail, but his conclusion
! with regard to the disengagement of the text from
i
i
16
metaphysical delineation does hint as to what could pos
sibly be the most extreme re-presentation of the encounter
3 6
between reader and text: namely silence. If not a lit
eral silence, criticism in the light of textuality must
! at least countenance metaphorical silence as a rendition
, of the reading encounter, for all language, even that which
}
I is used to counter historically defined usages, is impli
cated with (and inextricable from) its surrounding history
and culture. According to Derrida, there is no language,
syntax or lexicon that is "alien to this history." It is
even impossible to "utter a single destructive proposition
I
j which has not already slipped into the form, the logic,
I and the implicit postulations of precisely what it (new
I 37
I language) seeks to contest." If the contemporary critic
| is to countenance the textuality of the literary work, and
| consequently remain "silent," he/she can thus no longer
J use language that is centered in culture, history or logic.
; He/she, in other words, can no longer employ a mode of
i
j discourse that must refer to systems outside itself, for
, the task of referencing one system to another, one object
i
: to another, or one text to a larger "text" always consti-
I
i tutes the locating of centers, sources or truths.
; Removing the goal of establishing centers, the
! critic is deprived, essentially, of his/her work, at least
in the traditional sense where he/she is expected to
17
clarify or elucidate the literary text. Given the decen
tered nature of literature, the critic cannot attempt to:
. . . place all texts in a demonstrative oscil
lation, equalizing them under the scrutiny of an
indifferent science, forcing them to rejoin,
! inductively, the Copy from which we will make
! them derive.38
;There is, furthermore, no "lost fatherland of thought" to
j
I be acknowledged, retrieved or traced, according to Derrida,
I " 39
ivia the "myth of purely maternal or paternal language"
since "there has never been and never will be a unique word,
40
a master name."
Among the Structuralist critics, Barthes best
j senses the turning point which literary criticism of the
Jtwentieth century has approached since realizing that the
1
|structuring activities humans engage in are means of deriv-
i . 4 1 .
jing meaning out of the natural world. In his works,
j
we are. able not only to grasp Barthes' sense of this crisis
but are afforded demonstrations as to how and where "liter-
'ary criticism" may possibly head in the coming years.
I
! There is sufficient evidence to be found in the
jrange of Barthes' work to indicate that the application of
Structuralist methods will not be the sole means of either
confronting the text or of re-presenting the encounter,
;particularly if S/Z and The Pleasure of the Text are con
sidered as complementary works.
I
18
For all the meticulousness with which Barthes
undertakes the dissection and articulation of Sarrasine,
the exercise indicates only that Sarrasine is replete with
meaning and "remains silent . . . giving meaning its last
' 4 2
; closure: suspension." Such an inconclusiveness with
I
■ regard to the analysis of a text may well mark S/Z1s fail-
: ure as some critics have deemed it. But the point is pre-
; cisely that Sarrasine, and Barthes' analysis of it, will
j continue, with every act of scrutiny, to yield permuta-
1
I tions of possibilities. The sheer mechanical exercise of
I
I combing through the text after the manner Barthes has
! undertaken in S/Z can thus become an end in itself, see-
j ing that the activity is "less to assign completed mean-
! I
! ings to objects . . . than to know how meaning is possible,1
40
‘ at what cost and by what means." The text, as Barthes
I
j well knows, never yields, but an act such as S/Z is com-
, mitted in the same sort of spirit that drives human beings
| to, say, scale mountains or forge rivers. S/Z is, in
' other words, an active exploration of exploration into the
text as opposed to the somewhat more passive yielding to
the text as seen in The Pleasure of the Text. Each work
(
! is thus a diachronic function of the other, and they are
i not so much "objects as they have been made" as "pres-
! ence(s) for the fact of their 'having-been-made.1 In
| this respect, the two works present a demonstration of
19
Derrida's concept of diachrony with regard to systems of
signification.
Without the need of having to explicate meanings,
Barthes' confrontation of the text concentrates on reveal-
i
Iing the relational aspects of the text; in Barthes' words,
i 45
"we recompose in order to make certain functions appear."
i
jIn the recomposition of the text, meaning is incidental
I and the analyst needs simply to "speak the locus of the
| 46
meaning" without nominating it. The principle of cohe-
i
| siveness in such an analysis is "the infinite paradigm of
1
I
| difference" and the aim of such an evaluation is the dis-
! covery of what Barthes terms the "value" of a text's
| "writerlyness," namely its capacity to involve the reader
i
! in the act of mutual (re)creation. The referential activ-
j ity between reader and the "writerly" text is of a suffi
ciently integrative nature to warrant Barthes' observation
i to the effect that "the writerly text is in fact ourselves
writing before the infinite play of the world (the world
i as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasti-
! cized by some singular system (ideology, Genus Criticism)
[
i which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of
I 4 7
jnetworks, the infinity of languages."
I The plurality of the text is an important aspect
| of its "writerly" quality since it is what renders the
text impervious to domination by any one system of meaning.
20
The function of the textual analyst, according to Barthes,
would be first, to separate the "writerly" text from its
negative counterpart, the "readerly" text, or, to separate
i
i
I the text which can be read but not written from what
amounts to a "referendum" which offers the reader no more
! than "the poor freedom whether to either accept or reject
4 8
| the text." The means Barthes suggests to distinguish
i the "writerly" from the "readerly" is through the
Nietzschean notion of interpretation, that is, by render
ing the text to the expansiveness of its pluralities. In
i view of this, the classic text, bound by the finite appli
cations of previous systems and reduced to a narrow margin
i of what it is_ or ia not, may be regarded as a "readerly
text."
j In many ways, Barthes' S/Z, with its precise dis-
! sections and articulations, is a "readerly" complement to
i
! the writerly Sarrasine: there is not much one may write
I
I about with regard to S/Z, although Sarrasine itself re-
i mains relatively unscathed by the analysis. In the curi
ous saga of dialectical movements, the only alternative
' for Barthes was to write The Pleasure of the Text in order
i
: to complete/continue the diachrony touched off by the
' reading of Sarrasine.
To imitate Barthes' method, apply his codes as
j they are used in the analysis of Sarrasine, would be to
i miss the point of both Derrida’s and Barthes' vision
! 21
; as to the diachrony of signifying systems. The point
I
' against using a method, and in this instance Barthes'
i
j method, is less a quarrel with the structuralist activity
^ per se than it is one with the tendency toward substituting
old "truths" for new ones— that is, in treating the meth
ods and codes Barthes has devised as irreducible means of
»
gaining access to the entrances of the text. In his con-
' sideration of mimetic theories as they apply to the inter- 1
t
j pretations of a text, Bass indicates Derrida's position
j
I that when criticism is "programmed by two propositions
i
, . . . concerning mimesis," a double of the object in ques-
, tion is produced which does not differ qualitatively from
the model. Whether or not the double resembles its model,
Derrida adds, "the vehicle of imitation exists, because
: there is mimesis," and "... mimesis is governed by a
4 9
! truth outside of textuality."
i
^ Barthes' arrival at his five codes and its appli-
! cation to Sarrasine arose with his confrontations of the
text. As the "I" already endowed with "a plurality of
I
1 other texts, of codes which are infinite, or more pre-
I
i 50
! cisely lost (whose origin is lost)," Barthes' codes and
! their subsequent application to the text represent various
; coincidents whose shifting of systems and perspectives end
"... neither at the text nor at the ' I. '" In many ways,
S/Z is at best a vestigal trace of Barthes' encounter with
i Balzac's work, for in Paul de Man's estimation:
The completed form never exists as a concrete
aspect of the work that could coincide with a sen
sorial'- or. semantic dimension of the language.
It is constituted in the mind of the interpreter
as the work discloses itself in response to his
questioning. But this dialogue between work and
interpreter is endless. The hermeneutic under-
j standing is always, by its very nature, lagging
behind.51
' A work such as S/Z should not perhaps serve as a
I ---
| model for the apprehension of a text: what constitutes
! the most vital part of Barthes', or for that matter, any-
i
jone's confrontation with Sarrasine, belongs essentially
to the "space of literature" whose "presence" is violently
, exposed through "the mutual struggle between the faculty
i 52
of expression and the faculty of apprehension." The
codes and elaborate designations which are used in S/Z are
! what Derrida might term "geometrical" or "spacial meta
phors" which, because they are Barthes', that is, manifes
tations of his confrontation with the text, succeed in
part at making the text yield some of its pluralities,
j Mechanically applied, the codes, since they are now "truths
j outside of textuality," can only reduce the text to "a
i gallery of signifieds," and the exercise itself becomes
j hardly more laudable than the sort of "paint-by-numbers"
| activity undertaken by the artistically ungifted.
| Deprived of his status of judge and even of "fabri-
j cator" (in the sense of one who artfully fashions a system
♦
| "after-the-manner-of") , the critic is thus faced with the
i
i 23
I ----------------------- ~ “
! alternative of assuming the role of a vivifier of the text.
This, finally, is perhaps the only alternative in the wake
of Structuralism's revelation of the essentially imitative
! and repetitive systematizations that have constituted the
I
i mainstream of intellectual thought in the west. It is
1 somewhat ironic that the Structuralist movement should have
I
j opened up the way, in a sense, to its own destruction: for
i
j having revealed the diachrony of conceptual systems by
I employing modes of structuration, Structuralism, at least
| where literary criticism is concerned, must now indicate
directions away from its own sort of activity.
; According to Barthes, the access to the entrances
i
S of the text are many. His codes, he states, are meant to
‘ be mobilized by the text, "to extend as far as the eye
5 3
| [Barthes' eye] can reach." That these codes are in no
i
! way meant to be authoritative means of extending the plu-
1 ralities of the text is suggested by the fact that their
! use "is not to manifest structures but to produce struc-
l
; turation," and that they are but "off-stage voices," heard
| alongside the utterances of the text, certain interweaving
!
j strands of things "already read, seen, done [and] experi-
t
54
. enced." In this respect, the choice of codes assumes
1
j a certain arbitrariness as is clearly demonstrated in
i Barthes' The Pleasure of the Text,where the alphabetical
^ order presents the only "thread" of things "already read,
I 24
I seen, done and experienced" that leads into/out of a text.
Saussure1s theory of the unmotivated relationship between
the signifier and the signified may well be applied to the
i
! arbitrary choice of codes chosen to "represent" the text,
t
' for there is nothing to suggest a connection between chosen
| codes, in this case, the alphabetical code, and the con-
i tent of the text, except where there is a relationship
j between the codes in terms of themselves (the letter C,
1
for instance, comes after the letter B but is situated
before D, etc.) or with the elements of the text they might
be taken to "represent."
j The arbitrary designation of codes in The Pleasure
! of the Text suggests, perhaps, that the investigation of
i
a text can no longer depend on protocols of literary criti
cism since these protocols are, finally, "tendentious final
i
! terms whose job it is to terminate the symbolic process,
55
like mailboxes for letters." Consequently, if there is
: an unspoken right for tendentiousness, perhaps a final
! term as arbitrary as the alphabetical code may just as
I
I
1 effectively serve the purpose.
i
I
| To begin with, The Pleasure of the Text is a
; "critical work" without a primary text, that is, it is not
|
an interpretation of any particular work or author although
: Barthes touches upon the works of as diverse a range of
writers as Sade, Sollers and Proust. The "critic" thus no
25
longer occupies a secondary status in relation to the text.
This realization has come about as a result of the revela
tion that the Book is not "the record and storehouse of
5 6
anterior, natural totality of meaning." In turn, this
concept of the Book, Derrida adds, has always "formed a
I bulwark against the disruptive force of writing, against
! 57
I its aphoristic energy."
What this essentially leads to is that the BOok
is not sacrosanct: reader and text may confront each other
I on equal terms and the representation of their engagement
i
i
] need not be bound by the protocols surrounding the cere-
!
| monies attached to sacred objects. Furthermore, the con-
j cept of textuality, in lieu of the definitive center and
• circumscribed space allotted a work, offers the "critic"
| the freedom "to inhabit the negativity that generates
> 5 8
: structure," as well as to engage in the "jeu" or play
I
| of supplementarity that has not always been the preroga-
i
; tive of the literary critic.
I The relationship between artistic activity and
j critical rendition of engagements with the arts is far
■ more intimate than recent critical theory has been willing
; 59
! to countenance. Walter Benjamin, for instance, has noted
| that "... an increasing number of readers become writers
i . . . the distinction between author and public is about
, to lose its basic character . . . the difference becomes
6 n
merely functional." The demise of the critic as judge
and discerner of truth may well lead to the beginnings of
the critic as an artist in his own right. Consequently,
^ the questions as to the nature of the language and styles
i of discourse to be employed in this new mode of "criticism"
«
; provide material for those concerned with the future of
I literary discourse.^
! In direct response to the logocentricism which has
dominated literary protocols, both Barthes and Hassan have
offered an alogical alternative to approaching the text in
the way of what Hassan has termed "the erotics of partici
pation," and which Barthes exemplifies via an extended
j metaphor of bliss in The Pleasure of the Text. As repre-
: sentations of their engagements with the text, Paracriti-
i
| cisms and The Pleasure of the Text both relinquish the
]
I logistics and thematics of conventional criticism.
| The dismemberment of the Book as an organic form
j is undertaken by Barthes through the discontinuous and
I
! nondevelopmental course he takes in The Pleasure of the
| Text. His "proses" or phylacteries are no more than a
series of anecdotes, commentaries and, on occasion, veiled
I
i
j attacks against "the enemies of the text" who would "decree
l
( foreclosure of the text . . . by cultural conformism or
i 6 2
i by intransigent rationalism." Aside from the fact that
| these "proses" are ordered alphabetically, there is no
evidence of the sort of stern systematization of S/Z, and
the work as a whole is an affirmation of Babel, the affir
mation that:
. . . the confusion of tongues is no longer a
| punishment, the subject gains access to bliss
by the cohabitation of languages working side
by side: the text of pleasure is a sanctioned
Babel.®3
| If the access to bliss is through the chaotic
| babble of Babel, the suggestion here is that logic no
j longer holds absolute sway in the apprehension of the text.
I
| Instead, the sort of "intelligent passivity" Trilling
I
speaks of seems to be the means by which the subject may
be borne along in the progressions of the text to the point
! of ultimate bliss.
A clue to the "meaning" of The Pleasure of the
i Text may perhaps be found in Barthes' essay on Michel
! Butor's Mobile: Study for a Representation of the United
i ' ....
■ States. In Butor's work, each state of the Union is pre-
i ------
sented in alphabetical order and, according to Barthes,
I signifies "insofar as it rejects all other clarifica-
’ 64
; tion." By placing the states in alphabetical order,
t
I Butor necessitates the discovery of relationships other
i
! than those which exist "naturally" between the states. In
j the absence of natural and spatial contiguities save in
| the abstract, Barthes posits the fact that the alphabetiz-
' ing of the states allows for the "poetic contiguity" which
I
28
allows for a situation whereby states as far removed from
one another as Alabama and Alaska are brought together
"in that night which is the same and different: simultan-
65
eous and yet divided by a whole day." It takes a very
small stretch of the imagination to see the same functional!
aspects going on in Barthes 1 The Pleasure of the Text:
Butor's confrontation of the United States as a "created
piece" finds its double in Barthes' confrontation of the
text.
The point Barthes elicits with regard to Mobile
is that the fragmentary ordering of objects does finally
manifest spatial contiguities once the rhetorical model,
that is, the conventions associated with the developed
schema of the Book, is done away with and units of dis
course are seen in terms of functional rather than rhetor
ical values. It is because of their functional mobility,
therefore, that these units of discourse are able to shift
throughout the work, thus engendering an animation "whose
6 6
movement is one of perpetual transmission."
It is perhaps the figure of the mobile with its
perpetual transmissions which best suggest Barthes' point
in The Pleasure of the Text, and, in particular, the
notion of the incessant movement toward beingness that
must accompany every engagement with the text.
Mobile: that is, a scrupulously articulated
armature of all of whose breaks, by shifting very
slightly (which the delicacy of the combinatory
method permits) produces, paradoxically, the most
connected movements.67
In the figure of the mobile, too, we find a graphic
I
i
representation of Derrida's concept of textuality and with
it the realization as to what conventional criticism has
! been doing with the text: that it has occupied itself
essentially with talking about the mobile and its arma-
I
tures but has failed to capture the reciprocations and
interactions of its movements.
What happens when a text is "touched off" by the
: reader and how to render the referential movements that
| take place is perhaps the primary question that faces the
, literary "critic." By way of response, Ihab Hassan has
| offered "Paracriticism," which, he states, is "not a form
: strictly imposed but the tentativeness between one form
I and another.In a parallel statement, Barthes, while
i
| contemplating the prospect of bringing together all the
, texts which have given pleasure to someone in order "to
j display this textual body" finally accedes that "such a
6 9
; labor would end explaining the chosen texts."
In short, such a labor could not be written.
I can only circle such a subject and better do
: it briefly and in solitude than collectively and
interminably; better to renounce the passage
from value, the basis of the assertion to values,
which are the effects of culture.70
30
j To all intents and purposes, the "circling" of
I
the text or the "tentativeness" between forms best suggests
the progressions, the transformations and permutations in
! time and space, which constitute the text. On Barthes'
terms, the text thus does not need to be explained; in
stead, it needs to have a "shadow," and this "shadow is a
, bit of ideology, a bit of representation, a bit of sub-
1 71
: ject. "
f
I The damage which has been done to the text is that
logocentrism has essentially deprived it of its capacity
to elicit bliss, and bliss in an engagement with the text
i
I is achieved only via a correspondence on the part of the
\ reader to the "fearful apprehension of an ultimate impos-
! 79
, sibility" suggested by the movements of the text. Cor-
i respondingly, all representations with regard to the con-
i
I frontation between reader and text assume the sterile
j postures of established "isms."
|
| According to Peterkiewicz, "there is a syntax
I
. within time: each age hands down the latent voice of that
which it kept unsaid or could not say." The work of the
j Structuralists, and in particular, that of Derrida and
I Foucault, has "made the silence audible, and its meaning
i 7 3
j is already linked to the unsaid sequence of tomorrow."
!
! In Barthes' vision, there is a certain insensitivity, in
j the light of this, to continue to insist on affirming the
I
31
. --------
form, , on making permanent or on reducing things to the
"shared premise of vulgarity.If the literary critic
must finally insist on being scientific, Barthes states,
it is only because he is "not subtle enough to perceive
! that probably absolute flow of becoming" which is the
! nature of the text.
i Structuralism, it has been demonstrated, has con-
j stituted part of the "rupture" that Derrida sees as having
been initiated by the aggregation of Nietzschean, Freudian
and Heiddegerian thought. This rupture is, essentially,
| the disengagement from the mode of thought and the conse
quent viewing of the world in terms of fixed centers or
reference points that a perceiving subject could locate
J with regard to the object under his/her examination. In
] terms of literature, language and literary criticism, the
; revelation that systems of signification are in fact
I
] a-centered invalidates the sort of critical activity that
I
I
j concerns itself with the search for centers, or unifying
; truths. Methodology, or established procedures aimed at
: delineating the boundaries of truth, are consequently seen
j
, as being "center centeredness." Inevitably, any view of
: the literary text as that which must be identified with
, something outside itself constitutes the reduction of the
text to the level of a static object upon which the read-
1 ing subject may justifiably impose him/herself.
Textuality, on the other hand, perceives the essential
mobility of the text: it is this mobility which makes it
impossible to locate its centers. Correspondingly, the
perspectives, the activities and the discourses that are
i aimed at the location of centers in static texts have no
' place in the process-ional orientation that the notion of
I
j textuality brings about to the critical scene,
i Structuralism, as Derrida has pointed out, has
put into question the system to which all significations
have been submitted and how they function in terms of
thought. While doing so, Structuralism has exposed the
I
1 limits of such systems: these are the systems that are
| seen by Derrida as yet having some use although "no longer
i
| is their truth value attributed toward them; there is a
. readiness to abandon them if necessary if other instru-
| 75
; ments should appear more useful."
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER 1
i 1
j "But it is evident to anyone who observes the French
intellectual scene with some care that structuralism has
, been playing a key role in France for several years. More
i specifically, around 1962 structuralism, from a working
imethod known to and practiced by specialists, became a
I fashionable philosophy discussed in as many circles as
i Sartre's existentialism had been after World War II."
Jacques Ehrmann in the introduction to Structuralism (New
York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1970), p. viii.
2
This issue is discussed by Alexander Gelley in
"Form as Force," Diacritics, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring, 1972),
pp. 9-13.
! 3
i Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play in the
i Discourse of the Human Sciences," in The Structuralist
• Controversy (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1972), p. 251.
^Ibid., p. 249. J
j ^Michael Riffaterre, "French Formalism," in The
i Frontiers of Literary Criticism, ed. by David Malone (Los
, Angeles: Hennessy & Ingalis, 1974), p. 103.
1
' C .
; ' Roland Barthes, "The Structuralist Activity," in
! Critical Essays (Evanston, Illinois: North Western Uni-
! versity Press, 1972), p. 215.
I 7
i Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by Gayatri
j Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins
, University Press, 1974). De la grammatologie (Paris, 1967),
; pp. 67-69. "Differance" in Speech and Phenomena and Other
i Essays on Husserl's Theory (Evanston, Illinois: North
| Western University Press, 1973), pp. 146-147.
O
Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play," p. 251.
9
Alan Bass, "Literature/Literature," in Velocities
of Change: Critical Essays from Modern Language Notes,
ed. by Richard Macksey (Baltimore, Maryland: John Hopkins
■ University Press, 1974), p. 345.
34
^Bass, p. 349 .
■^Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play," p. 24 9.
12_, . ^
Ibid.
' 13
Eugenio Donato, "The Two Languages of Criticism,"
in The Structuralist Controversy (Baltimore, Maryland:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 96.
14
Bass, p. 344.
"^Donato, p. 96.
: 18Tzvetan Todorov, "Language and Literature," in
I The Structuralist Controversy, ed. by Richard Macksey
j (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press,
j 1972), p. 129.
17
Martin Buber, Between Man and Man, trans. by
Ronald G. Smith (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 10.
18T,
Ibid.
19
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans.
by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1974), p. 65.
20
Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 56.
21
Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play," p. 272.
22
Michael Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge,
trans. by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper, 1972),
p. 26 .
2 3
Ihab Hassan, Paracriticisms (Urbana: University
of Illinois Press, 1975), p. 5.
24
Riffaterre, p. 102.
25
Wei Wu Wei, Ask the Awakened (Boston:, Little
Brown & Company, 1963), p. 236.
2 6
Foucault, "Nietzsche," Cahiers de Royaument,
Philosophie, No. 6 (Paris, 1967), p. 189.
27
Roland Barthes, S/Z (New York: Hill and Wang,
1974), p. 8.
28Ibid., pp. 10-11
35
29
"In order to make explicit the integrative
capacity of elements one must define its relations with
other items of the same level. These distributional levels
are of two kinds. Syntagmatic relations bear on the pos
sibility of combination: two items may be in a relation
of reciprocal or non-reciprocal implication, compatibility
or incompatibility. Paradigmatic relations, which deter
mined the possibility of substitution, are especially
important in the analysis of a system. The meaning of an
item depends on the differences between it and other items
which might have filled the same slots in a given sequence."
Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism,
Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Ithaca, New York,
Cornell .University Press, 1975), p. 13.
30
Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play," p. 260.
31
Gelley, "Form as Force," and Edward Said,
"Eclecticism and Orthodoxy in Criticism," Diacritics,
Vol. 2, No. 1 (Spring, 1972).
32_
6 cLS S / p • 351.
^Foucault
34
Bass, p.
, p. xix.
352.
"^Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play," p. 260
36See Ihab
Paracriticisms, pp
Hassan's "Critics of
. 17-28.
Silence," in
37~
Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play," p. 250
33Barthes, S/Z, p. 3.
^Derrida, Speech and Phenomena, p. 159.
40Ibid.
41
Donato xn "The Two Languages of Criticism" indi
cates Levi-Strauss' melding of history, literature and
myth as a direction literary criticism may take in the
future.
4 2
Barthes, S/Z, p. 46.
36
4 3
Roland Barthes, "The Structuralist Activity,"
in Critical Essays, trans. by Richard Howard (Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1972), p. 218.
44Ibid. , p. 219 .
45Ibid., p. 216
46x, . ^
Ibid.
47
Barthes, S/Z, p. 5.
4 ^Ibid., p. 4.
49
Derrida, La dissemination (Paris: Edition du
Seuil, 1972), pp. 350-352.
SO
Barthes, S/Z, p. 10.
51Ibid.
O
! Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays in
j the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford
j University Press, 1971), p. 31.
i 53Barthes, S/Z, p. 6.
54Ibid.
t
55
j Edward Said, "Eclecticism and Orthodoxy in
I Criticism," p. 4.
I 56
Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 304 .
57
3'ibid.,
5 8
Gelley, "Form as Force," p. 13.
59
Walter Benjamin, quoted m Hassan's Paracnti-
j cisms, p. 26.
i
I 60Said, "Eclecticism and Orthodoxy in Criticism,"
p. 15.
61
Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, p. 15.
^Ibid. , pp. 2-3.
37
6 3
Barthes, "Literature and Discontinuity," in
Critical Essays, p. 181.
64T, , ,
Ibid.
6 5 T, . ,
Ibid.
6 6 , . ,
Ibid.
67ibid.
6 8
Hassan, Paracriticisms, p. 25.
69
Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, p. 4.
70ibid.
71Ibid., p. 32.
7^Ibid., p. 5.
7 3
Jerzy Peterkiwicz, The Other Side of Silence;
i The Poet at the Limits of Language (New York: Oxford
'University Press, 1970), p. 72.
I
i 7^Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, p. 61.
i 7 5
1 Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play," p. 254.
38
CHAPTER 2
DIS-COURSE OFF COURSE
We have not insisted enough on the meaning
and extent of the operation which tends to return
language to its true life: rather than trace the
signified thing to the sign which survives it—
which would prove impossible at any rate— much
better to proceed in a single leap to the birth
of the signifier.
- Andre Breton
In his article, "Two Criticisms, Roland Barthes
■attributes the limitations of academic or positivistic
j criticism to its determinism which insists on viewing the
:text as a product caused by factors outside of itself.
i
i
, Such a deterministic perspective then necessitates the sort
!
of activity engaged in by positivists— namely, the excur-
j sions elsewhere into the realms of history, biography,
j
'psychology, etc. Such excursions, however, according to
I
iBarthes, are not aimed solely at providing definitive
I
|causes for the existence of the text, for the activity
involved in traditional scholarship is of a sufficiently
: demanding nature to provide the academic system with "an
instrument of selection" whereby it is able to judge and
|reward those it deems worthy.
! 39
In Contemporary Literature's special edition,
"Directions for Criticism: Structuralism and its Alterna
tives," Edward Said has decried the absence of critical
histories of criticism itself, this in spite of the recent
■ willingness on the part of critics to write criticism of
i 2
! criticism. What Said specifically points to is the lack
I
[ of any consideration as to the "social and political im-
j
! pingements on criticism," adding that "criticism is con
sidered what critics do, irrespective of their archival
or worldly circumstances." Said then adds that criticism
and its production is, still and yet, considered that
I which "has always been done, with no change or past to
I 3
j speak of."
I
j Academic criticism and the standards of scholarship |
t
i it imposes on graduate students and faculty members alike
! have not, to date, given serious consideration to what the
activity involved means, particularly in terms of the
socio-political impingements of academic expectations.
i
i
I Writing "scholarly" screeds to be pickled and put up
I
j against the winter of one's tenure review indicates the
"what has always been done" aspect of criticism which, in
turn, suggests either the susceptibility to, or the tacit
agreement with a "universal order which has fixated once
1 4
, and for all the hierarchy of possessions." Criticism as
it is fostered by academia has not, in other words,
40
disengaged itself from its own fictions to the same extent
as its discoveries in recent years of the fictionality of
discourse.
| The writing of criticism still works toward the
i
clarification, the elucidation or verification of literary (
f
or critical texts. It will, seemingly, continue to do so
I for as long as it remains tethered to the exigencies of
l
academic ends: namely, to provide, via logical and propo-
sitional discourses, clear "causes" (hence authorizations),
for the products at hand, be they plays poems, novels, or
criticisms. That these causes be retrieved is linked fur-
i
! ther to the need to "teach" literature, that is, to render
!
; a text in terms of an area that can safely be said to be
)
| the knowable.
I Contemporary criticism's failure to concede to its
J own fictionality is hinged, therefore, on the fact that
: critics are generally also teachers, and, with pedagogical
! ends in mind, it becomes necessary that the language of
I explication be that of logical discourse. For it is the
j expository nature of logical discourse, that is, its abil-
! ity to limit areas of intellection within specific bound-
I
| aries, which enables the "laying bare" of a literary text,
j Grammar, "the well-developed argument," chaste syntax with
I a good measure of whatever terminology happens to be a la
mode are all believed to be the means of transubstantiat
ing the interaction between reader and the text. There
41-
is a faith, in other words, in the fact that, if there is
knowledge to be gained with the reading of literature, it
is to be gained through a discourse that ex-plains. Every
I
I use of language that communicates information with regard
! to a text falls prey to the fallacy that meaning, that is,
' a measure of communicable information, resides somewhere
; "behind" the text. Logical discourse, which is rooted in
| philosophy and oriented around the procedures of the sci-
i
ences, is always motivated by the "impulse to thrash out
meaning . . . the compulsion to wrench linguistic elements
5
into some kind of meaningful order." It is discourse
that is governed by the premise that an exacting corre
spondence exists between language and reality: the criti-
; cal activity, in this regard, becomes merely a matter of
f
exchange since meaning and order are always "out there"
! to be retrieved by language.
j
j The choice on the part of critics to use logical
J discourse as their critical medium is also influenced by
I the "traditional" distinction between scientific and crea-
, tive languages. That the balance swings in favour of the
i
i former is linked to the academically fostered notion of
I
the pragmatic ends literary criticism must serve.
Even the most cursory glance at the criticism of
the majority of critics writing today tends to indicate
i
| the persistent adherence to both the aims and practices
42
of "good writing." With such an adherence, there is, in
relation to Barthes' definition of mythologizing, the aim
at fixating the practice of criticism in terms of a famil
iar discourse. In his exposition of myth, Barthes des-
! cribes myth making as the:
' [fixating of] this world into an object which
' can be forever possessed, catalogued and in-
j jected with some purifying essence which will
I stop its transformations, its flight toward
i other forms of existence.®
Criticism, in other words, is built around a spe
cific discourse which, in turn, co-operates with the aim
! of criticism to fixate a certain share of the epistemolo-
!
j gical terrain thereby granting itself a certain authority.
! Such a discourse is inevitably governed by standards of
I
j expressions and expositions that tend to exclude categori-
i
I cally any expression of the reading engagement that threat-
I
ens the staus of critical discourse as it "always has been.
i
A critic like Edward Said may articulate that:
j Criticism must be an activity whose main pur-
S poses are the enablement of learning and the
I multiplication of critical discourse, from re-
j striction to comparative freedom.7
| The contention is that before criticism is able to move
' toward the "multiplication of critical discourse(s)," or
be open to a "flight toward other forms," consideration
; should be given to the dualistic nature of the process
i
i
i which constitutes the reading engagement. It is only in
43
view of this consideration that corresponding alternatives
to logical discourse as means of limning the reading en
gagement can be seen as valid alternatives to the more con
ventional expositions of literature.
i
! In his work Visual Thinking, Arnheim distinguishes
human cognition in terms of intuitive and intellectual
j modes. Intuitive cognition, Arnheim notes, tends to in-
i
volve the apprehension of a piece of art in terms of the
interaction of the components which make up the work.
Arnheim states that:
This interaction of perceptual forces is a
| highly complex field process, of which as a rule,
very little reaches consciousness. The final
outcome does become conscious . . . and a great
deal of thinking and problem solving goes on in,
and by means of, intuitive cognition.” j
Intuitive cognition or "synoptic thinking" is also present
i
| in problem solving in the sciences since problem solving
i necessarily depends on the "restructuring of perceptual
1
1 9
I situations."
i .
I In contrast, the mechanics of intellectual cognition
| involve the isolation of components and the description of
| relationships between components:
I
I
j In this fashion stable and independent con-
| cepts develop from the more or less stable and
j more or less circumscribed entities constituting
the perceptual field. By gradually solidifying
I the perceptual concepts gained from direct expe-
1 rience, the mind acquires the stable shapes
which are helpful for consistent thinking.10
i
i
44
The manifestations of intellectual cognition are in the
ordering of verbal sequences, the linking of logical pro
positions and the enumeration of items. Logical discourse,
| which arises from intellectual cognition, is consequently
1 linear and one dimensional since it attempts to stabilize
: apprehension in a "four dimensional world of sequence and
! simultaneity."^ It is discourse that in Derridian terms
i could be said to be the attempt at bringing about coin-
l
j cidences of the projected ends of knowledge with its
12
means.
The efforts at stabilizing cognition, or at immo
bilizing a fundamentally fluid and undifferentiated uni
verse for the purposes of identification and transmission,
i
j result inevitably in making it static: the one-dimension-
: alism of the effort always produces univocal assumptions
i as. to the limitability of a given perceptual field. In
' this regard, logical discourse is seen as aspiring to be
the discourse of the "engineer," that is, it is the dis-
i
| course of "a subject who would be supposedly (my emphasis)
!
' the absolute origin of his own discourse and would suppos-
i edly construct it 'out of nothing,' out of whole cloth,
! 13
! would be the creator of the verbe, the verb itself."
It is discourse which adapts itself, as Levi-Strauss puts
I it, to a specific technical need.^ In contrast, the
i activity and discourse of the Levi-Straussian notion of
!
! 45
the bricoleur is seen as a natural extension of intuitive
cognition: the cognition of finite ensemble in terms of
the interaction and substitution of components that con-
[ stitute the ensemble. The perspective of the bricoleur
re-cognizes essentially the observation made first in the
I
eighteenth century by the naturalist Albrecht von Haller:
: namely, that humans necessarily think serially or in sue-
i
; cession since they are unable to "present several things
I 1 5
at once m thexr speech." On the other hand, von Haller
noted, Nature "connects its genera in a network."
| The apprehendable field, as the Structuralists have
! indicated, is a network of signs'*-®— a network in which one
; sign always leads to another and all signs engage in a
I relationship suggesting the permutations and substitutions
of game playing. It is crucial that this play of substi-
!
j tution takes place in a polydimensional space, for in such
| a space no projected ends ever come into complete focus
i
| and logical discourse, consequently, with its aims and
j origins in philosophy (the love and search for knowledge)
and the sciences, cannot range itself against the activity
i in such a space where the field, according to both Derrida
j and Levi-Strauss, is both theoretically and empirically
j unknowable.
j The confrontation of a literary text, it is sug-
i
i gested, encompasses a field of intellection that logical
46
discourse is unable to parallel. What is offered as a
manifestation of the confrontation between reader and text
and the interplay of cognitive modes is a discourse that
"masks" its inadequacy by offering a distracting ploy:
j
' logical discourse capitalizes on its ability either to re-
I
1 trieve or impute meaning to a text, but it is unable to
I
i yield itself to any other activities which constitute the
reading activity. It is the concealment of its inability
and the corresponding elevation of its limited function
which constitutes a dissimulation of "the natural, primary
and immediate presence of sense to the soul within the
j logos." In Derrida's view, such a dissimulation amounts
i 17
to "violence [which] befalls the soul as unconsciousness."
I
| The unconsciousness, in terms of the continued use of logi-
\ cal discourse, lies in the lack of consideration of the
i reduction of language to the status of object since the
nineteenth century. As an object, language is used but
I
hardly questioned. How it constitutes or delineates the
I
j real or the knowable has, till recent years, been disre-
; garded in favor of focusing the attention upon the mean-
I
* ings or areas of signifieds it encloses. There is, then,
I in the discourse of academic criticism, an opacity that
i has come about through the accumulated notions as to cor-
i
j rect, or incorrect discursive practices. It is, in other
i
i words, still a "locus of tradition, of unspoken habits of
i
i
I 47
• 18
thought of what lies hidden in people's minds." Con
sequently, it has gathered to itself "an ineluctable mem-
19
ory which does not even know itself as memory." Logical
discourse inherits, to a large extent, the nineteenth
»
i
' century penchant for linguistic precision. It bases its
' positivistic activity on the notion of logos as "reason,"
| "judgement," "concept," "ground," or "relationship," ac-
i
! cording to Heidegger. But this notion, Heidegger points
I
out, is incorrect since logos is, instead, "discourse"
and similar to delodn which is "to make manifest what one
is talking about in one's discourse." Logos is said to
[
j permit something to be seen phainesthai and seen apart
i from what is talked about. Thus, Heidegger states, "when
i
: fully concrete, discoursing (letting something be seen)
j
I has the character of speaking (and possesses the likeness
! of) utterance in which something is sighted in each
I 20
, case." In this manifestable aspect of logos, Heidegger
I finds the quality of "being true" in that:
the entities of which one is talking must be
! taken out of their hiddenness; one must let
j them be seen as something unhidden otAriQeC
J that is, they must be discovered. Similarly,
j "being false" 'FevSeaa^ amounts to deceiv-
; ing in the sense of covering up: verdecken:
j putting something in front of something (in
j such a way as to let it be seen) and thereby
, passing it off as something which it is not.21
1 It is the misunderstanding of the meaning of logos, i.e.,
taking it to mean "reason" or "judgement" as opposed to
I
I 48
the discourse described by Heidegger, that has led to the
loss of the apophantic function of logical discourse as
we know it. Logical discourse as we know it no longer
: points to phenomena; we are less concerned in using logi-
| cal discourse with the bringing to manifestness of the
! world than we are with enforcing meaning upon phenomena.
i
1 For as Palmer puts it:
Of course, through dogmaticism a thing can be
J forced to be seen only in the desired aspect.
I But to let a thing appear as what it is becomes
| a matter of learning to allow it to do so, for
it gives itself to be seen. Logos (speaking)
is not really a power to language by its user
but a power which language gives him, a means
of being seized by what is made manifest
through it.22
On the basis of taking logos to mean "reason" and/or
! "judgement," logical discourse aims at neutralizing itself
to the point where it is best able to render itself the
i
; 23
absolute "mirror of nonverbal knowledge." As Foucault
i
| points out, this is the positivistic dream of relegating
I
I
; language to the plain of the known, or, as Heidegger sees
it, the comprehension of logos as assertion or judgement.
Logical discourse is seen as a carrying through of an
[
assumption founded on an essential falsification since its
| primary premise is that it can, in fact, duplicate the
( area it designates, that it can encompass the field of
; the Known. In Nietzsche's view the possibility of logical
! thinking and its inferential activity is hinged on this
49
| premise, and "the assumption must first be treated ficti-
24
tiously as fulfilled." Ironically, logical discourse
and its specific ends are subverted for the very fact that
I
■ logic itself does not arise from a determinism to truth,
but that:
' The will to logical truth can be.carried
through only after a fundamental falsification
i of all events is assumed from which it follows
that a truth here is capable of employing both
means, firstly falsification, then the imple-
! mentation of its own point of view: logic does
j not spring from the will to truth.25
j In this regard, logical discourse may be seen as
I
j limiting the area of knowledge it sets out to mirror while
I
I at once proscribing that which cannot be thought. Its
[
I propositional nature can represent a "visible" facet of
! discourse, that is, discourse marked by its formalities,
; its own self-references. It can never, however, represent
I that which it reflects, as Wittgenstein observed, and this
| includes the representation of the experiential and senso-
; rial confrontations of the world. Its modes are those of
i argumentation and experimentation; it demonstrates logical
forms as "imbedded linguistic structure, and can talk
j about these without any reference to the world of physical
i 2 g
j events and processes." Additionally, the testing aspect
. of logical discourse can only deal with "these 'things'
: 27
I as the 'out there' and the independently processing."
Inherent in both these modes is what has been
looked upon as western man's insistent search for God and
the homologous search of the critic for an ontology of the
text that constitutes its authority. "Toujours vous vous
i
1 dirigez vers un but," Ling of Malraux's La Tentation de
■ 1'Occident writes to his French correspondent A.D., "vers
2 8
I lequel vous §tes portds tout entiers." God and the on-
t
, tology of the text are where man has placed them: God,
I
| Nietzsche points out, is not to be rid of for as long as
i we still believe in grammar, that is, for as long as there
is faith in an existing priority even before the manifes
tation of a linguistic expression. The fallacy of this
belief is rooted equally in humanistic and scientific per
spectives. This amounts essentially to a belief in the
1 fiction of a knowledge that supposes the existence of
i
"things-in-themselves." Correspondingly, the supposition
i
\ establishes direct causal links (via written discourse)
I
J between objects, thoughts and facts-in-themselves: But
I
! knowledge, at best, is referential, the placing of the
\
I
j individual in correspondence with (an)other. Thinking,
I
I conceived epistemologically, emerges as a secondary fic-
I
| tion whose arbitrary existence is arrived at first,
• through the selection of certain elements from the process,
: then through the elimination of all the rest in an artifi
cial procedure whose purposes are geared toward the
: 51
29
establishment of intelligibility. Additionally, because
its closure is insured by its specificity and its aims are
directed at the establishing of knowledge, logical dis
course can no longer truly be, as it claims, a medium of
j
: communication. It bears instead "the weight of a gaze
I
conveying an intention which is no longer linguistic" or
; communicative. On these terms, even the articulation of
I
"facts" becomes impossible since these so-called "facts"
are in a sense "contaminated" by the interpretive weight
30
of their non-linguistic gaze, as Barthes suggests. There
is, in other words, always the tendency on the part of
individuals to select their perceptions to the extent that
1
J these perceptions best preserve their interests, even
j though the overt intent is the disinterested establishing
5
! of facts.
! In this selection from one's universe, it is not
simply the derivation of facts or knowledge from the world
t
| which occurs. There is, too, a creation via certain modi-
I
) fications of "facts" and/or "knowledge"— the creation that
I
( emerges out of the activity whose mechanism is based fun-
i
j damentally on the insertion of new materials into old
I frameworks. To what ends (or from what motivations) the
creation of "knowledge" may direct itself is further de
termined by valuations aimed at self-preservation and at
i
: the realization of "humankind's common desire . . . for
i
i
52
a stable center and for the assurance of mastery— through
knowing or possessing."'^'1 '
The creation of the knowable and what eventually
becomes familiar is constantly held in check by the pro-
1 cesses which have been identified by Barthes as steps
toward the solidification of mythologies. Within estab-
, lished and stabilized orders, a perspective that posits a
belief in the fable of knowledge is necessary for the
maintenance of order. Correspondingly, the health of an
order depends upon its capacity for self-centering, for
even as it pretends to defer to the priority of knowledge,
i
j and hence to authority, it cannot, on pain of its own
j
; destruction, either acknowledge its self-creation or con-
I
| cede to the creative will. For creation is always sub-
j version against the One— the multiplicity that emerges
|
J from creative activities the assurance that authoritative
| categories must crumble.
I The status of logical discourse as the accepted
i
' medium of literary criticism has been stabilized by the
historical fact of its being the way criticism has always
■ been executed— it bears the authority of "the way things
I
; have always been done-ness." Its bearings in logic (that
| is, logic as reason, and judgement) have become the means
! of preventing the inclination of language toward the con-
j flation of two areas that language must deal with, namely,
the area of delineated knowledge and the area of the
create-able reality imminent/immanent in every linguistic
utterance. If, as Wittgenstein has stated, the limits of
32
language mean the limits of one's world, logical dis-
i
■ course as used in criticism can be seen as the constant
] effort to assert its own mode (not its substantiality) in
I
j the service of insuring that criticism remains as it al
ways has been, that is, the maintenance of its status and
functions.
Kuhns has pointed out that logical discourse is
I "a saying language" and only peripherally a "showing
j language." However, intent or the Nietzschean will to
I
! power with which "a species grasps a certain amount of
i
' reality in order to become master of it, in order to press
\ 33
; it into service," effects a shift that renders its trans-
i
I
formation from a signifier to a sign of "something else."
; In this shift, which is akin to Barthes' model of myth as
| a second order language, logical discourse assumes an am-
i
I biguity that lends it a "kind of density and resistance
34
j beneath the transparency of signs." It does so by vir-
: tue of its full acquisition in this shift of a larger
| portion of the capacity to "show." By doing so, it ac
quires, essentially, two signifiers: the signifier that
communicates the desired message and the one on the
| process-ional level that has objectives outside of what
54
1 is being said. Logical discourse, because of the intent
i :
; that governs it, can "show" as it were, but its gesticula-
I j
j tions that are meant to convey authority are obfuscations
I
j of its limitations.
- To write criticism, to render an account of an en-
i counter with a literary text, is still to write under the
shadow of a myth, the myth that the activities of human
■ perception can be made familiar through logical discourse,
j and that familiarity itself is possible. According to
i
■ Hegel, to assume that anything can be made familiar amounts
' to self-deception and the deception of others— "what is
; familiarly known is not properly known, just for the rea-
35
son that it is 'familiar.'" But criticism's connections
to pedagogical ends will always necessitate activities
I
which are aimed at making the world and literary texts
I "familiar" or "knowable." The deception that enters into
i
| the acts of familiarization, however, is the assertion
i
1 that such acts are definitives rather than tentative,
i
peripheral renditions of moments in the reading encounter.
There is "the other side of reading" that criticism has
i yet to acknowledge, and once acknowledged, to provide an
! adequate discourse for the limning of the "original ele
ments" or Hegelian "moments" in reading.
A return to these "moments"and to the mutagenic
instances that any reading of a text suggest will require
a discourse that neither arises from nor directs itself
j at causes. It is discourse that will not, furthermore,
be occupied with the retrieval of the knowable. In 1911,
Joel Spingarn made the observation that:
Every age has its masculine as well as its
i feminine criticism— the masculine criticism that
: may or may not force its own standards on liter
ature, but that never at all events is dominated (
by the object of its studies . . . feminine
criticism that responds to the art with a kind
of passive ecstacy . . .in our (age) outside
of the universities, it has certainly been fem
inine. But they continue to exist side by side,
ever falling short of their highest powers, un-
j less mystically mated— judgement erecting its
I edicts into arbitrary standards and conventions,
enjoyment lost in the mazes of its sensuous
indecision.36
I
\
\ There is, in Spingarn's statement, the identification of
i
i
; the two sides of reading and the manifestation of the en-
; counter between the reader and the text in terms of "mas-
t
; culine" or academically fostered discourse. It is dis-
. course that best represents the penetration of a text in
i
I the attempt to "perceive all that is being said through
' 3 7
! [words] and despite them." In the light of what has
■ been said as to the creation of knowledge in the selec-
i
tions one makes from one's milieu, such a penetration
1 is always, as Foucault notes, a re-emergence "on the side
j of the knowing subject— as soon as that subject expresses
3 8
what he knows."
Logical discourse perpetrates the act of will upon
the text, demonstrating, as Barthes points out, the differ
ence between the activity of the critic and the mere
reader of the text. For Barthes, to be a critic, "c'est
39
d^sirer non plus 1'oeuvre mais son propre langage."
Motivated by the same desire to create, the critic puts
pen to paper and engages in writing. But as Barthes has
!
j observed, to write is to "fracture the world (the book) in
' an effort to reconstitute it," and this violation of the
! text is never committed without a certain guilt. Conse-
i
i quently, expiation is accomplished by fraudulently identi-
j
t
fying "the original fact with its remotest subsequent
40
transformation," then authorizing the violation through
the evocation of cause, God or authority. On these terms,
! every critic is placed, seemingly, in a double bind: he/
I
i
I she is humbled at once to the point of not being of suffi-
j cient "stature" (as the creator of the text) to articulate
i
I an original idea or serve as a point of origin. Yet he/
i
she is disdainful enough to avoid the risk of an "erron-
i
; eous" judgement and must align his/her evaluations along-
| side an authoritative voice.
Domination by the text, on the other hand, as both
i
! Barthes and Spingarn recognize, involves the recognition
i
| of what has always been the prerogative of the lecteur or
reader whose encounter with the text is unhampered by
j logical or intellectual frames of references. According
. to Barthes, while the critic touches the text with writing,
1
j the reader does so with his/her eyes. Correspondingly,
! 57
it is this difference that "met entre la critique et le
lecteur un abime."
There is, in Barthes' description of the relation
ship between the lecteur and the text, an echo of
i
Spingarn's "feminine criticism" with its response to the
1 lure of art, its passive ecstacy, its element of "enjoy-
i
ment." In Barthes' view, the rapport that is maintained
i
by the lecteur and the work is the tension akin to desire,
j To read, he asserts, is to desire the work, to want even
: to become the text to the extent of refusing to "doubler
i
I 1'oeuvre en dehors de toute autre parole que la parole
| mSme de l'oeuvre."^ This refusal to "double" or repeat
the text consequently implies the absence of any means of
I signifying this desire: Barthes muses that this desire
I
j lies outside the capacity of linguistic codes and that per-
I
i
i haps the only "commentaire qui pourrait produir un pur
4 2
lecteur et qui le resterait, c'est le pastiche." At any
i
I
j rate, what is certain is that logical discourse cannot
| serve as a means of representing this desire for the text.
t
^ Although the critic is, possibly, a lecteur, the
j reverse does not always hold true. To read in Barthes'
terms is to succumb to the pleasure of the text and to
permit the suspension of the text's signified value. The
I impact of such a suspension is, additionally, a "veritable
i
i 43
j epoche, a stoppage which congeals all recognized values."
I
! 58
In this regard, logical discourse (since it is bound by
grammatical authorizations, its univalency in terms of a
certain given) becomes superfluous with the absence of a
signified value; its primary function after all is the
I
s
! communication of signifieds and, contingently, the produc-
<
tion of values.
/N
i The "abime" that exists between critic and lecteur,
: it is suggested, is necessary only as long as there is the
belief that no linguistic "codes" exist for the limning
I of the experience of the lecteur. To a large extent, the
i --------
I absence of such manifestation, particularly in academic
i
| criticism, is understandable, for its discourse would be
j
; of a kind that would render it impossible to determine
' values. As Barthes observes:
! If I agree to judge a text according to
: pleasure, I cannot go on to say: this one is
j good, that bad. No awards, no "critique," for
| this always implies a tactical aim, a social
i usage, and frequently, an extenuating image-
I reservoir.44
!
j That the expression of the reading encounter lies
! outside linguistic codes does not imply that it is beyond
! language. In view of the capacity of language to create
I
I new fictions, new realities by virtue of its inherent multi-
■ valency, the rendition of response becomes entirely pos-
t
! sible if there is either an abandonment of the systems
; that have compromised language into certain signifying
59
functions or innovations within the constraints of linguis
tic systems. The discourse of the criticism of pleasure
will thus be the engagement of the process-ional, the
a-historical and the new, since "every language immediately
! 4 5
; becomes old once it is repeated." It is discourse that
! neither fraudulently repeats the text under the surrepti-
i tious terms of a metalanguage nor speaks in the pseudo-
| anonymity of authority.
j In articulating the possibility of what he terms
an aesthetic of textual pleasure, Barthes suggests a "writ
ing aloud" whose ends are not that of expression or the
i
: clarification of messages but the indication of life pres-
f
I ence. For what such (a) discourse(s) will always show in
! their continual self-generation are "the pulsional inci-
! 4 6
I dents, the language lined with flesh." Such a discourse,
I
according to Barthes, would parallel the actio of ancient
!
: rhetoric, whereby there would be the allowance for the
i
| "corporeal exteriorization of discourse." It has been
i
observed that logical discourse is a "saying" language and
’ peripherally a "showing" language although the mythic pro-
i
I
: cess has effected, in academic criticism, a shift that has
t
| transformed the logical discourse from a signifier to a
! sign. What Barthes' aesthetics of textual pleasure seems
| to suggest is that the discourse of "feminine" criticism
I
j will involve a "showing" language elevated to "the
i 60
sumptious rank of signifier" with a corresponding suspen
sion of signified value.
A discourse that does not signify is not necessar
ily alogical; it is perhaps trans-logical in the sense
i
, that it spans the area or space of the signified although
. it is not itself limited to the areas delineated by the
; known. It is the discourse, in other words, that recon-
i
stitutes, metaphorically, the dissolution of the reader
j in a text, the text that Barthes views as the "tissue" and
not a product. In the notion of the text as tissue, there
is :
i
i
j The generative idea that the text is made,
| is worked out in a perceptual interweaving; lost
j in this tissue— this text'— the subject unmakes
himself, like a spider dissolving in the con-
! structive sections of its web.47
There is, in this perspective, the view articu-
! lated by Spingarn of the response "to the lure of art with
i
I a kind of passive ecstacy" and of enjoyment's disappearance
i
1 "in the mazes of sensuous indecision." The discourse that
[
! corresponds to the text's subjugation of the reader is
t
thus necessarily metaphoric since it cannot be discursive,
i.e., it does not proceed in a progression of reasoning
»
j or through systematic argument toward an end point. Its
: metaphoricity, however, is not based on a system of equiv-
| alence but on the moments of its self-creation, on the
i gestures of its corporealization. The discourse of textual
I
61
pleasure is essentially an activity, the actio whereby
the reader (in the process which is the reverse to that
of his/her dissolution into the text) becomes evident,
i engaged as it were in his/her own re-creation. The author-
; ity provided by cause, God or whatever predetermined point
' of origin, which additionally lends a veil of anonymity
' to the critic, is thus absent in a discourse of pleasure.
, As a showing language, the discourse of pleasure always
i
: points to a performing presence whose existence is not
hidden by a signified and whose movements, in what Barthes
i
j terms "the science of becoming," must always remain un-
j predictable. The capriciousness of the discourse of pleas-
i
! ure is founded on the relational perspective that engages
I the reader to the text. Hence, the definitive language j
I
| of logic, which stops at phenomena and which insists on
i
i closures, is antithetical to the tentative "flow of abso-
| lute being" that characterizes the reading of pleasure.
]
The tentativeness of the reading subject contrib
utes, furthermore, to the capriciousness that must mark
| the critical discourse which is characteristic of reading
j the text er(ra) (o)tically. For as Barthes points out,
i
the part of the reader that is encountered in a "Sensuous"
reading of the text is the so-called "body of bliss," the
! culmination of the interplay of biographical, historical,
I 4 8
i sociological and neurotxc elements. But the reading
62
subject's emergence from the text is always, as Barthes
puts it, anachronistic, there being no point at which the
body of bliss coincides with the text, no locus that may
be endowed with significance or origin.
i
It is the absence of origin that is perhaps most
disturbing for the deterministic critic geared to thinking
i of himself/herself as a secondary force in relation to a
literary encounter. Deprived of a starting or focal point
I
j in his/her encounter with the text, the critic is often
forced into a state of paralysis, unable to function in
! terms of the cumulative expectations as to how a critic
! should think, proceed in his/her work or sound in terms
J of his/her discourse, this in spite of the responses,
inter-actions and creations that arise from the reading
: of the text. As Edward Said has pointed out, "If critics
t
I
: today often feel that they are paralyzed by the sheer dif-
! ficulty of finding a subject about which to write, it is
because they have not realized the part of independent
i 49
j creations in criticism."
i The advocation of independent creation in an activ-
j ity that has always been linked to pedagogy still consti-
| tutes, seemingly, a ring of rebellion against the more
traditional procedures of literary criticism. For a critic
, like Northrop Frye, the scientific approach to literary
criticism assures the discipline its autonomy while
63
investing it with systematic safeguards against what he
terms "external invasion." Furthermore, it is the pres
ence of science, according to Frye, that changes the nature
of a subject from "the casual to the causal, from the ran-
1 50
1 dom and intuitive to the systematic." The scientific
! approach suggests, however, a certain perceptual stance
i
j and is coupled, more often than not, with a method through
i
! which such a stance may be justified. Specifically, a
scientific approach is operable only if there is an agree
ment that there is the distinction between a perceiving
subject (the reader) and the object (i.e., the text). On
the basis of the Cartesian set up, Gadamer points out the
ease with which any method implemented by a perceiving
subject can be manipulated so as to control the responses
| to a text. A scientific approach which posits a method-
j ology always amounts then to an assertion that takes "the
! object out of its historical moment and restructures it
51
to suit the method." Methods, Gadamer adds, are modes
of questioning that presuppose certain answers, whereas
any true questioning amounts to placing the text in the
i
I open.
i
i Any critical stance which takes upon itself a
sense of its own high seriousness requires a methodology
| or system that makes it necessary for the critic to bring
| his/her own aesthetic assumptions and criteria to the text.
i
c
64
This is done in order to "precondition" the text inasmuch
as systematic approaches supposedly aim at discovering the
"literary work on its own terms rather than remaking it
to serve" their own terms. The aesthetic proconditions in
I
; any systematized approach, Krieger states, often bring
I about the reduction of the text in terms of the preliminary
I
j assumptions. These assumptions always end up, Krieger
adds, hammering "consistency or conformity into mere uni
formity," hence every approach, scientific or otherwise,
[ effects a transformation: scientific or creative, legis
lative or theoretical. No text remains exactly in the
i same state after each successive contact with the critical
reader.52
! In this light, the old controversy as to the dis-
| tinctions between scientific and creative impulses appear
I moot. In 1901, W. C. Brownell protested against the "fac
titious dualism that had been set up between critical
! (scientific) and creative activity." He observed that:
I
; Real criticism, criticism worthy of its
j office . . . contributes as well as co-ordinates
; and exhibits. It is itself literature, because
it is itself origination as well as comment and
I is the direct expression of ideas rather than
| an expression of ideas once removed— either
chronicling the effect on the critic after the
manner of the impressionists or weighing them
j according to some detached and objective judi-
i cial standard.53
I
! In a later article, Brownell was to add that even acts of
i
| reason, that is, scientific activities, are in the end
! 65
54
based "on instinct" and that "faith underlies reason."
In Brownell's notion of "real criticism," we find the
recognition that the scientific and creative impulses are
I
! inseparable where the reading and critical activities are
1 concerned. Intellectual activity cannot readily be iden-
; tified apart from response, and in such a view the
i Gadamerian sense of pre-Cartesian dialectics manifests
i
I
j itself. That which is broadly categorized as thinking,
Gadamer states, recognizes thinking as part of itself.
Without the division between perceiving subject and pas
sive object, subjectivity is not taken as a starting point
i
j upon which the objectivity of knowledge is then anchored.
!
! Hence, if the Cartesian dichotomy necessitated the scieri-
J tific approach by which an object could be perceived dis-
j interestedly, the dialectical approach tends to negate
1 scientific attempts in that it is the antithesis of method
: " . . . [the] means of overcoming the tendency of method
I
j to prestructure the individual's way of seeing," specifi-
i
; cally in terms of dichotomies that produce oppositions
! between subject and object, scientific and creative, self
i
i
I and other, etc. Methodology is thus seen by Gadamer as
i
j an ineffective means of garnering truth since "it renders
j
i explicit the kind of truth already implicit in the
55
i method." The dialectical approach, on the other hand,
I does not posit knowledge as something to be either
i
i 66
acquired or possessed since it is not "the other." Knowl
edge is viewed instead as "something in which they (the
ancients) participated, allowing themselves to be directed
and even possessed by."~*^
In the absence of a judging, questioning subject,
| the matter encountered "poses the question to which he
! (the enquirer) responds." Additionally, response is seen
j
as being possible only on the "basis of [one's] belonging
57
to and in the matter." The Barthesian yielding to the
text becomes possible on Gadamer's terms if there is the
"immersion in the subject itself," as in the Platonic
dialogues where the movement is in "unforeseen directions"
and where the partners are guided by "common immersion in
* 58
; the matter under discussion."
i
j The dialectical approach countenances both the
! scientific and the creative impulses: in the interchange
I
between reader and text not only is the text transformed
as the reader touches it but the reader him/herself, as
part of the universe of the text which he/she enters, is
i
I transformed. For art, as Gadamer observes, is self-hood
and the world of others. When we take in art, he states,
we risk everything that we are for:
| We bring what we have experienced and who
: we are into play . . . the work of art puts a
j question to us, the question that called it
; into being. The experience of a work of art
‘ is encompassed and takes place in the unity
i and continuity of our own self-understanding.
!
! 67
There is a persistent belief, even today, however,
that only a scientific pursuit of criticism {and corre
spondingly, a scientific discourse to match) is valid.
There is a strange valuation attached to this belief,
i
' namely, the assumption that that which is the product of
' labor— and the ordering and codification of systems is,
j undoubtedly, work— is necessarily valid. In this same
I system of valuation, creativity, emerging as it does from
I
"the shadier realms of reason . . . [from] that twilight
! zone formerly associated with myth, metaphor and mystical
6 0
I experience" comes out second best and is regarded sus-
i
j piciously as an "easy way out" of what in fact should
I
entail labor.
I Undoubtedly, there will always be a place for sys
tematic approaches to the reading of the text. Alterna-
i
! tives to the rendition of the reading experience, however,
have yet to be considered particularly in the light of the
| perspective that no longer distinguishes the subject from
I
I
j its object and, consequently, between a subjective or ob-
j jective, i.e., scientific or creative account of the read
ing experience. As Ihab Hassan points out on the authority
j of physicist Max Planck, "the pioneer scientist must have
I
j a vivid intuitive imagination for new ideas, ideas not
i generated by deduction, but by artistically creative imagi-
i 6 X
I nation." The admission that "all the best sciences
i
i
I
{have] soft edges . . . limits that are still obscure
and extend without interruption into areas that are wholly
6 2
inexplicable" serves further to mitigate the impact that
the insistence on determinism and objectivity holds over
^ criticism and its discourse.
! If criticism is no more "scientific" than science
j itself is, then the discourse of logic, of linearity and
I
I deduction seems certainly to have exhausted its limits
with regard to coping with the territory that constitutes
the human imagination. The coming of age of criticism
is reached only as it recognizes that "it is itself ori
gination," and hence empowered with the rights and privi
leges of exploratory discourse. While decrying the fact
j that "even advanced literary criticism to-day is pro-
J nouncedly ethnocentric and seems indifferent to everything
I 6 3
, but the politico-socio status-quo,Edward Said does not
I
j go on to advocate any specific program of change.
(
j The contention here is that criticism must begin
|
! to take a long hard look at itself in terms of the fic
tions with which it has permitted itself to become en
tangled. That these fictions are linked to pedalogical
i ends has always necessitated a discourse that has worked
i
i to a large extent toward both the creation and the pre-
i
j servation of the politico-socio status quo. In the light
I of recent advances in the study of human perception,
i
1 69
where the boundaries between the perceiving self and the
object are no longer clearly delineated but are, instead,
engaged in a constant flow of creation and re-creation,^
the directions that lie open to critical discourse are
I performance and exploration. If the critic's job is to
; "mime" or repeat the "text in its extension from beginning
I
j to whole," if he/she is to realize that "the genesis of
65
human work is as relevantly interesting as its being"
then he/she must openly acknowledge the pre-eminence of
his/her own presence and participatory role in the engage
ment with the text. The extension of this acknowledgement
can only be made manifest in discourse that realizes the
capacity of language to both enclose the limits of the
I
| mind as well as to create "models than they themselves
; are."®^
1
! For many, this will seem to represent the license
j to chaos, and in all probability only a few will be willing
[ to venture into the unknown territories that represent
I
i the human will to constantly extend the boundaries of the
1 known. These, according to Frank Barron, are the gifted
j artists and scientists who show a willingness "to take
risks and rely on imagination and even dream; [who have]
j a preference for complex asymmetrical, and elegant pat-
6 7
terns; great self confidence." These are the individuals
who constitute criticism's advance guard and who, having
70
r - - -
learnt the lie of old languages, know that "what is in
volved is the right to one's own tongue.
I -
71
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER 2
i Roland Barthes, "The Two Criticisms," in Veloci-
1 ties of Change, ed. by Richard Macksey (Baltimore: The
! Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974), p. 71.
I 2
j Edward Said, "Roads Taken and Not Taken m Con
temporary Criticism," Contemporary Literature, Vol. 17,
No. 3 (Summer, 1976), pp. 338-339.
^Ibid.
4
Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. by Annette
Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1970), p. 155.
I 5
; Richard Kuhns, Structures of Experience (New York:
; Harper Torchbooks, 1970), p. 237.
i ^Barthes, Mythologies, p. 15 5.
^Said,"Roads Taken," p. 34 4.
i o
| Rudolph Arnheim, Visual Thinking (Berkeley:
i University of California Press, 1969), p. 233.
I ^Ibid., p. 234.
| 10Ibid., p. 246.
I in
| G. Spivak, Of Grammatology, Preface (Baltimore:
j Johns Hopskins University Press, 1974), p. xix.
I 12
■ Jacques Derrida, L'Ecriture et la difference
| (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967), p. 423.
i 13
' Jacques Derrida, "Structure, Sign and Play," m
The Structuralist Controversy (Baltimore: The Johns
; Hopkins University Press), p. 256.
t
i ^4Claude Levi-Strauss, La Pensee sauvage (London:
j Weidensield and Nicholson, 1967), p. 16.
1 15
1 N. R. Hanson, Patterns of Discovery (Cambridge:
! Cambridge University Press, 1965), p. 69.
72
"^Michel Foucault, The Order of Things (New York:
Vintage Books, 1973), pp. 294-304.
17
Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 37.
1 8
Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 297.
19Ibid., p. 296.
20
Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. by Edward
Robinson (New York: Harper, 1962), pp. 56-57.
1 21 , . ,
i Ibid.
i
22
Richard Palmer, Hermeneutics (Evanston: North
western University Press, 1969), p. 128.
23
Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 296.
24
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. by
Walter Kaufman and J. R. Hillingdale (New York: Vintage
Books, 1968), p. 277.
25Ibid., p. 277.
2 6
Kuhns, Structures of Experience, p. 241.
27Ibid.
2 8
Andre Malraux, La tentation de l1Occident (Paris;
Gallimard, 1970), p. 28.
29
Nietzsche, The Will to Power, pp. 264-301.
30
Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero and Elements
of Semiology, trans. by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1967), pp. 19-20.
31
G. Spivak, Of Grammatology, p. xi.
32
Wittgenstein m Kuhns, Structures of Experience,
p. 246.
2^Nietzsche, The Will to Power, p. 275.
34
Fredric Jameson, The Prison House of Language:
A Critical Account of Structuralism and Formalism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974), p. 147.
73
35
George Wilhelm Hegel, The Phenomenology of the
Mind, trans. by J. B. Bailie (New York: Harper Torch
Books, 1967), p. 92.
3 6
Joel Spingarn, The New Criticism (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1911) as quoted in American
Literary Criticism, ed. by Charles J. Glicksberg (New York:
Hendricks House, Inc., 1951), pp. 79-80.
37
Foucault, The Order of Things, p. 29 8.
38Ibid., p. 296.
39
Roland Barthes, Critique et verite (Paris:
Edition du Seuil, 1966), p. 79.
40
Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, p. 25.
4^Ibid. , p. 79 .
42
Ibid.
4 3
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans.
by Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 65.
44 , . ,
Ibid., p. 13.
45
Ibid., p. 40.
4^Ibid. , p. 66 .
47Ibid.
48Ibid., p. 62.
4 9
Edward Said,
38Northrop Frye
ton: Princeton University Press), p. 7.
51
Gadamer in Palmer's Hermeneutics, p. 194.
52 •
Murray Krieger, The Personality of the Critic
(London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1973),
p. 73.
5 3
W. C. Brownell, American Prose Masters m
American Literary Criticism, pp. 12-14.
74
54 . . . . .
W. C. Brownell, "Criterion," American Prose
Masters in American Literary Criticism, p. 116.
5 5
Gadamer in Palmer's Hermeneutics, pp. 165-166.
56.,
, Ibid.
^Ibid.
5 8Ibid.
1 59
| Ibid.
j ^Ihab Hassan, "Beyond Arcadians and Technophiles:
■ New Convergences in Culture," Massachusetts Review, Spring,
1976, p. 11.
61Ibid., p. 10.
: 62Ibid., p. 11.
^2Said, "Roads Taken," p. 34 8.
64
Norman Holland, "Transactive Criticism: Recrea-
; tions Through Identity," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 18,'
i No. 4 (Fall, 1976), pp. 334-352. "Whenever we experience
: something ostensibly outside ourselves we do so by recre-
, ating ourselves through that something. Or to state it
! more abstractedly: a mind recreates identity through
experience," p. 355.
^Said, "Roads Taken," p. 34 8.
6 6
Hassan, "Beyond Arcadians," p. 11.
! ^Ibid. , p. 10 .
6 8
Geoffrey Hartman, "Criticism and Its Discontents,"
| Critical Inquiry, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Winter, 1976), p. 217.
75
CHAPTER 3
THE AVANT-GARDE CONSCIOUSNESS
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in
rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I
choose it to mean— neither more nor less."
"The question is," said Alice, "whether you
can make words mean so many different things."
"The question is," said Humpty Dumpty,
"which is to be master— that's all."
- Lewis Carroll
There is therefore in every present mode
of writing a double postulation: there is the
impetus of a break and the impetus of a coming
to power, there is the very shape of every
revolutionary situation, the fundamental ambi
guity of which is that Revolution must of nec
essity borrow, from what it wants to destroy,
the very image of what it wants to possess.
- Roland Barthes
I Normal criticism has always been unconscious crit-
: icism in the sense that it involves activities in terms of
i given (and unquestioned) constraints posited by authorized
| sanctioning of history, literature or tradition. What the
i
i avant-garde consciousness opens out is a situation that no
I
i
| longer allows for the sort of faith that assumes the sacro-
! sanctity of institutionalized disciplines and their
76
ordinances, and, correspondingly, allows the activities
that take place in accordance with the designations of
these disciplines.
I Epistemologically, criticism in terms of methodol-
I
ogy or theory can become impossible: in the light of the
i
avant-garde consciousness, the individual who becomes aware
i of the arbitrary nature of constraints humans tend to estab
lish in their apprehension of the world, becomes aware too
\
j
as to what methodology does and what it implies. Two
alternatives lie open to the critic who is motivated by
such a consciousness. He/she, upon recognizing the con-
i
I
j straints> may make it his/her work to articulate the limits
1 of thought and to examine the ways in which these con-
I straints produce and validate their presences and the areasj
j of knowledge they surround.
I
| As a second alternative, the critic whose aware-
!
ness is similarly motivated can choose to move out of the
areas designated by traditional boundaries of accepted
! knowledge, criticism, or whatever. He/she opts to create,
I in other words, his/her own frameworks of thought in the
j hopes of ever delineating new areas that can be termed the
j knowable.
, There is, of course, the option to go on function-
i ing in terms of given constraints, to continue with criti-
! cal activities as they have always been performed or shaped
by sanctioned perspectives in spite of the awareness as
to what it is that the human imagination does as it at
tempts to know the world.
Of the contemporary critics who have chosen the
i
1 second alternative, it is suggested that Roland Barthes
| in France and Ihab Hassan in the United States best demon-
! strate this wresting of consciousness from established
i
! thought constraints in their critical practices. It is
this wresting of the consciousness from given or pre-
established designations that will be referred to as the
avant-garde consciousness; hence, while Renato Poggioli's
Theory of the Avant-Garde is a study of poetry and art,
i
I his delineations as to the avant-garde consciousness will
i
| be shown to have applications with recent modes of criti-
I
1 cism.
! As a phenomenon in the critical field, avant-garde
! critics are motivated by, and function according to, prob
lems and circumstances which are peculiar to the practice
i
i of literary criticism. But the conditions that have al-
! lowed for their appearance in the critical scene are anal-
; ogous to the dialectical modulations in historical time
i
i
i that gave rise to the avant-garde movement in art and
i
' literature.
! Implicit in the term avant-garde are the dual
concepts of rebellion and advancement: the first
i
78
constituted, according to Poggioli, in the term long before
its associations with art^ while the other is seen meta
phorically as "not so much an advance against an enemy as
marching toward . . . or exploring of that difficult and
2
j unknown territory called no man's land." It is in terms
! of the spirit of these two movements— rebellion and ad-
I
] vancement— that avant-garde critics of our day^ have estab
lished their bases, and they have done so in the same vein
of self-consciousness that marked the beginnings of the
avant-garde movement in the early portion of the twentieth
; century.
I
i
| In Bontempelli Massimo's view, avant-garde art
■ emerged only as art began to contemplate itself in terms
I
| of history. Likewise, the climate that has fostered the
recent emergence of avant-garde critics has been one that
has countenanced the critical examination of criticism
itself. But where avant-garde art and literature could
not exist until the invention and elaboration of the notion
itself, avant-garde criticism, arising out of the priority
j
; of avant-gardism in art, appears as a direction in criti
cism whose practice itself constitutes the consciousness
j of its place in the history of literary criticism.
Technically, avant-garde criticism cannot fully
I
j claim the status of a movement as does its counterpart m
i
art and literature, for, as Poggioli suggests, the aims
79
of any movement are "to obtain a possible result, for a
concrete end" and to further the profession of the avant-
garde consciousness in all of the arts. To date, no mani-
t
(
[ festos have appeared as to the aims of avant-garde criti
cism, no methodology as yet constituted as to the proce-
1 dures to be taken in the representation of the reading
i
: experience. As with the French critics whom Hayden-White
; has called the Absurdist Critics, the American avant-garde
i
I critics "do not represent a reform movement" and, conse-
i
quently, do not "go on to recommend specific methodologi
cal reforms that will permit criticism to do better what
4
it has always done adequately." The avant-garde critic
is thus interested in fostering a certain consciousness:
i
j The consciousness as to the changing nature of things,
! specifically, the necessity of accommodating the repre-
| sentation of the reading experience within changing phil-
! osophical, social or literary frames of reference,
j The affiliation that can be established between
i
|
| avant-garde criticism and the avant-garde movement in art
I
*
is' thus less in the situation of aims than in the affir-
*
!
: mation of the principle of dynamism. For, as with avant-
I
j garde art, there is, in avant-garde criticism, a dynamism
’ born of no purpose save for. its own sake, "out of the
| sheer joy of dynamism, a taste for action, a sportive en-
i thusiasm and the emotional fascination of adventure."^
80
That rebellion and advancement encompass these moods is
not superficially evident. Considered in terms of its
perspectives with regard to literary texts and the rendi
tion of its encounters with the same, avant-garde criti-
I
cism can, however, be seen to affirm the elements of play,
! the spirit of adventure and the propensity toward action—
all this while promulgating its radicalism and explorations
' • into unknown territory.
I
1
j In articulating an anatomy of rebellion with re-
| gard to avant-gardism in both the arts and in criticism,
it may be seen that the attempt at recovering a sense of
self motivates the agitations against traditions, insti
tutions, established social or political systems. Human
j beings, according to Ortega y Gasset, have constantly
; managed to lose themselves in social, political, or ethical
! constructs they create for themselves, but "thanks to this
; sensation of being lost [they] can react by setting ener-
! getically to work to find themselves again.For Ortega
; y Gasset, rebellion against given modalities of human ex-
j perience amounts to the search for what he terms radical
I reality "that is of roots" and which "admits no reality
f
j beneath it," seeing as such that human existence has be-
■ ! come so densely covered by constructs that even the pain
i
I of others is seen "in the last analysis [as] a supposition
i
; 7
i or presumption . . . [as] presumed pained." This notion
reflects the Heideggerian premise that human existence
is finally the "concealed prisoner, almost forgotten, of
western static categories." For Heidegger, the aim of
human activities was, consequently, directed toward the
release of Being from this imprisonment via hermeneutic
| phenomenology. According to Palmer, "From the beginning
]
; Heidegger sought a method of going behind and to the root
! of Western conceptions of Being." Heidegger’s quest was
I
for a more fundamental ontology than "the presuppositions
g
upon which Western concepts of Being were based."
This proclivity toward radical reality then mani
fests itself in the attempts at evading the formalized
consciousness of an age, a society, or a time. It real-
t
i
; izes that it is the formalized consciousness of any par-
i ticular group or time that allows for the valuation of
i
; experiences or events as truth, depending on how these
i
i
j events or experiences are measured against the established
j constraints. Rebellion, as such, is the assertion against
I the familiarized, the institutionalized view of life that
: tends toward the obliteration of individual existence.
"I rebel," Camus states, "therefore exist," adding that
"rebellion though apparently negative, since it creates
| nothing, is profoundly positive in that it reveals the
! 9
I part of man which must always be defended."
i
I 82
The spirit in rebellion recognizes the arbitrari
ness of constraints against which his/her experiences are
measured. By countering the bulwarks of "knowledge,"
I "history," or "truth," the rebel senses the essential fact
1
1 of existence itself. Leben, as Heidegger recognized,
j affords glimpses of itself in experiences. In these
| glimpses, Being "escapes the conceptualizing, specializing
! and atemporal categories of idea-centered ■thinking."'*'^
I Existence, in other words, is "nontransferable": if it is
i
i
to be sensed it must be done so through the penetration
i of human fictions "without any possible substitute, deputy
I
i or proxy," according to Ortega y Gasset. In view of this,
i
i even "reality" itself becomes suspect; "it is there, it
! ex-ists, resists" Ortega adds, thus presenting a view of
I existence with strong connotations of struggle and bellig-
I
> erence built into it. Existing, he states, necessarily
1 11
i includes resisting, but rebellion motivated as it is by
i
the search for essential existence is never egoistic or
solipsistic since it is founded upon a consciousness which
recognizes the presence of:
the energy implanted in myths and metaphors,
styles and fashions, in the images that insin-
I uate themselves in the back of the eyes and
‘ ears, there to direct, unless we consciously
j combat them, even our acts of silent self-
imagining. 12
By acknowledging the forces from which it strives to dis-
' engage itself, the spirit in rebellion is freed from
83
solipsism or egoism in that it senses its total involve
ment in the interaction between social, philosophical, or
historical constraints and itself. In contrast, the search
for the "I" in the mainstream of western philosophy is
\ always the search in terms of the "I" in terms of the "not
j I," that is, an "I" removed from the interacting relation-
t
| ship constituted by both the individual and external con-
t
straints. In this respect, according to Poggioli, the
avant-garde spirit must be considered as "eminently aris
tocratic" since its protest is "expressed by the choice
13
I of an enemy's emblem." Avant-gardism, in other words,
I
; assents to the fact that its existence is necessarily
i
! locked into that against which it is rebelling, that no
; definitive point marks the division between the object j
it combats and itself— there is only a dialectic between
self and other— an engagement that is always agonistic and
f
! sustained by its own tensions. In Poggioli's words, it
is the engagement whose "pathos [is that] of a Laocoon
struggling in his ultimate spasm to make his own suffering
i
! immortal and fecund.In this struggle, self-assertion
is accomplished not by a separation from the opposing
force, but through the capacity to encompass as well as
t
i to defy "the opponent."
I
]
I On these terms, the contemporary penchant for self-
, reflexiveness, the twentieth century epochal self-
I
| consciousness, is itself a manifestation of the avant-
garde consciousness. Bontempelli Massimo, as has been
noted, saw avant-garde art as "an exclusively modern dis
covery born only when art began to contemplate itself from
15
a historical viewpoint." This "self-contemplation" is
i
^ the basis for the reflexiveness which Paul de Man detects
| in Modernity. According to de Man, it is a "falling away
j from literature and a rejection of history [which] also
I
I
| acts as the principle that gives literature duration and
historical sense.
The principle of dynamism which is operative in
de Man's view of modernity allows for the emergence of one
i
' literary tradition out of another in terms of a dialectical
| mode that engages the principles of rejection and accommo-
! dation. Avant-garde criticism, it is suggested, recog-
l
I nizes a parallel mode with regard to the practice of lit-
I
1 erary criticism, for it comprehends that, for as much as
' one tradition "rejects" or counterposes another, its very
‘ rejection insures its permanence alongside that of the
] past tradition and that of the newly created tradition.
1 Every tradition, literary or critical, in other words, in
; its transformation into future beingness already contains
! its own historicity or past and the seeds of future states
!
■ of being. But once engaged in this dialectic, it must
: continue to perpetuate the gestures of rebellion and
! advancement which delineates its existence since it is,
i
I
I _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ ! ! _
finally, in these gestures that human presence, hence
existence, is made manifest.
Inherent in the concepts of rebellion and dynamism
is the Nietzschean injunction that humans must forget in
i
* order to act, for to remember antecedents is to attempt,
j figuratively, at running and yet be bound by chains. In
j cultural terms, Richard Poirier notes, it is the waste
I
that constitutes a literary or artistic heritage that inev
itably stultifies creative potential and it is, conse
quently, the consciousness and the disposal of these
"wastes" that the avant-garde spirit advocates. As Tristan
| Tzara puts it, "there is a great destructive, negative task
I 17
i to be done: sweeping out, cleaning up."
i
j Rebellion as a form of forgetting, by virtue of
i
I its dislocation from the historical or the commitments to
1 established ideas, is then to be considered a liberating
: force. When freed from "knowledge," humans, according
! to Nietzsche, are thus able to do something. The rebel's
!
] denunciation is seen furthermore as an "unfairness" toward
: the past inasmuch as his/her subversion acknowledges only
. "the right of what is now coming into being as the result
18
: of his own action."
! Freed from the bondage of prevalent human con-
i
j structs, the rebel does not need to repudiate them fully
i
but rather uses them as:
86
One of the possible scales on which to move
and as an image of alternative scales that might
be imagined, [in this way] human beings [thus]
face a remarkable opportunity: the release of
energy into measured explorations of human poten
tialities .
The impulse that is fundamental to avant-gardism
i is one which attempts the obliteration of the antecedent
' as it aspires to the impossible state of a presence that
I
xs to serve as a locus of other originations. It is the
impulse that carries in it, as both Derrida and de Man
have pointed out, the image of parricide and upon which
writers such as Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Artaud and Sukenick
I 20
i have based their visions of art and literature. It is
i
!
the act of murder, Cioran points out, that both supposes
] and crowns revolt, adding that the individual who is un-
I
i aware of the desire to kill "may profess all the subversive
opinions he likes, [but] will never be anything but a con-
I formist."^
i
I Aesthetic radicalism, in terms of the opposition
i
! that is launched forth against that special category
i
; called the older generation or the antecedent, inevitably
; serves, as Poggiolo indicates, to heighten the "youthful"
j aspect of avant-gardism. Part of this youthfulness arises
| from the fact that its opposition is often manifest "in
[ terms of game, where game is placed in opposition to [the]
' 22
1 classical or [the] traditional."
i
87
Positing rebellion as play, however, is against
the Sartrian designation of the high seriousness that char
acterizes revolutionary impulses. According to Sartre,
seriousness is the high measure an individual places on
i
1 the reality of the world as opposed to the reality he/she
I confers upon him/herself. The revolutionary seriousness
. \
1
j arises out of a knowledge of the presence of an oppressive
I
I force. This knowledge is then followed by the desire to
change the status quo. But where the Sartrian rebel is
seen as the serious "man of the world" with no resources
i in and of himself, the struggle that engages the avant-
l garde consciousness is one that seeks a world outside the
I
I given limits of the real, the acceptable or the true. Its
I
j seriousness is that which locates itself in the struggle j
■ i
| to free itself from established constraints. By the same
I
1 token, it cannot purport to measure its creations or activ-
i
I ity in terms of "the serious" since to be serious is always
i
J to play in terms of constituted definitions.
i
I It is hardly surprising that the products of such
I
j a consciousness are often deemed strange, ridiculous or
1
I "outre." It is a consciousness which Goldmann sees as
J
having produced much of contemporary art he terms "the
; art of refusal." It is art, he adds, which "denies forms
: that society has created and in which it has traditionally
seen itself." Consequently, it manifests this refusal by
88
"finding new forms of expressions unlike those which con
stitute the given limitations within which the conscious-
23
ness is expected to function and to sense itself."
Where high seriousness, arising from complicity with the
i
! world, disapprobates resourcefulness, playfulness (or the
! will to violate or test the given constraints) gives rise
i
i to expressions that finally constitute the new, the crea-
1 tive or the original. It is play that promises the flight
from the forces that tend to transfix the serious rebel
in and to the world, and the avant-garde consciousness
i
i necessarily incorporates play as part of its rebellion
i
i
j and exploration. What the element of play effects is a
[ distancing that produces a multiplication of perspectives
i as opposed to given views within given referential frames, j
i But it is their effecting of distance from familiar views
I
I of the world that inevxtably produce the so-called obscur-
! ities or perversities that characterize the art and liter-
; ature of the avant-gardes. Literally, this distance from
f
l known orders, that is, dis-order, marks the "flight toward
i
! a world where things are not horribly fixed in unalter
able correctness."^
j In this exploratory flight, the tentativeness
| in play and the notion of unknown outcomes is suggested,
j To a large extent, this is in keeping with the Nietzschean
J concept of the Die frohliche Wissenschaft, or the gay
I 89
science, which posits the opposition to "the universality
and the universal binding force of a faith; in sum, the
25
nonarbitrary character of judgment." The counter move-
i
1 ment against such a force, in Nietzsche's view, can only
' be produced through play and with play, the associations
! with risk taking of the sort Derrida terms the amor fati,
I that is, the gamble between chance and necessity where the
j stakes are always pitted against that which constitutes
f
"the law." The play, as Nietzsche recognizes, is always
dangerous in its uncertainty and the activity itself, the
I privilege of "the happy few" who awaken "in the midst [of
t
i a dream] to the consciousness that they are dreaming" the
I fictions that give value to life. This brief awakening,
, Nietzsche adds, can be followed by a knowing agreement to
j go on "dreaming," to go on in the creation of the world,
t But the individual who has so-to-speak "awakened" is in-
I
duced to proceed on a course that can no longer engage
in self-referencing in terms of established delineations
I
\ without a certain sense of irony: there cannot be a total
I commitment to the old forms, old languages or old values.
I The activity of the awakened dreamer is now, as Nietzsche
j
j puts it, the dance of the Over-man which is performed as
■ a sign, an affirmation of the human capacity to create
I
! continually the forms which constitute the world.
90
The affirmation of life in terms of the avant-
garde consciousness is not in the glorification of the
objects created by humans, that is, not in institutional
ized art, obdurate perspectives or even in the concept of
t
' what Volbondt terms the monotone of the "I." The "ulti-
I
macy, exhaustion paralyzing self-consciousness and the
I
i adjective weight of accumulated history [must be made in-
26
stead to] . . . go on, go on, go on," .via the turning of
all ultimacies, including final definitions of the self,
against each other in the continual cadence of flight and
return. It is not the created object that holds the atten-
i
I
j tion of the avant-garde consciousness but rather the dis-
J placement that has taken place as a result of rebellion
i I
; against ultimacy.
I (
[ In producing a displacement, avant-gardism, as
I Poggioli notes;
. . . in many cases, is far more interested in
motion than in creation, gestures rather than
arts. It reveals how and why, its creation
often appears as a vulgar variant of aestheti-
cism and sometimes is reduced to nothing more
than a kind of o p e r at io n.2 7
The emphasis on the performative and operational
reduces correspondingly, the primacy of one created entity
J over another; all things and creations become linked as
| it were in a flow of perpetuating forms. This is a per-
! spective that is expressed by Ling in Malraux's La
Tentation de l1Occident, for in a letter to his western
correspondent A. D., Malraux's protagonist states that:
La vie est une suite de possibilites parmi
lesquelles ndtre plaisir ou ndtre tendance
secrete est de choisir et d'orner . . . de notre
j cerveau, nous ne voulons faire que le spectateur
se son propre jeu, incessant modification de
l'univers.28
\
' In a perspective that posits a fluid world of possibili-
| ties brought about through the continual merging and dis
persal of things, the imperative to choose is negated
since artist and creation are no longer juxtaposed but co
exist in a continuum of interactions. In this respect,
| creation, in the absence of specifically located points
i
, of origin, tends to be methetic (methexis) rather than
’ mimetic in that it is not creation arising out of the j
! confrontation of differentiated phenomena but that eraerg- i
ing from in-volvement of phenomena. It is the creative
j enterprise that Sypher sees as that which is "free from
special points of view [and is, consequently] freed from
all conditioning— from memory, from ideas and theories,
' 29
j from logic, from the despotism of convention."
I
j It is here that the purely performative or opera-
; tional aspect of language production in avant-garde and
| twentieth century literature discovers the "truthfulness"
! to which Novalis alluded:
I
j The ridiculous and amazing mistake people
' make is to believe they use words in relation
! to things. They are unaware of the nature of
language— which is to be its own and only con
cern, making it so fertile and splendid a
mystery. When someone talks just for the sake
of talking he is saying the most original and
I truthful thing he can say.30
i
According to Sartre, "man is serious when he takes himself
for an object." In terms of linguistic discourse, the
t
objectification of humans is seen to have been effected
i through the insertion of language between reality and con-
; cept. By virtue of its having made itself indispensable,
j language has produced a situation where "the individual
j becomes dependent on it and is forced to abandon his
1 31
i rights to the world." The individual, in other words,
i surrenders his/her mastery of the world since it is lan-
I
1 guage that shapes him/her as well as the world rather than
, his/her use of language to accomplish the same. The objec-
i
; tification of humans takes place the moment they agree to
!
i
; enter into the agreement to use language in terms of es
tablished linguistic norms, the moment they agree to "talk
in order to mean" or to "talk in order to say."
The play which in Sartrian terms releases the
I
individual from subjectivity and affords him/her the free-
| dom to create reality based on individual rules, allows,
j
| at once for the escape from human objectification by lan-
i
I guage. By the same token, any creation of new rules inev-
| itably suggests necessary choices that have to be made as
I to the primacy of one rule over another. This can only
j 9-3
tend to lead back toward the sort of entrapment by rules
and structures that instigated the rebellion in the first
place. The avant-garde consciousness diverges from the
existential theory of play in that it promulgates no rules
i
from which to choose save the understanding that all rules
be violated and that its play be based on the element of
i
| chance. The guarantee as to known or accepted outcomes
! that comes from operating within the limitations of rules
or laws is relinquished. The consciousness is made to be
pitted against, or placed outside of established con
straints. What is effected, essentially, is the awareness
of a distance that the consciousness has travelled in the
I movement from its former situation in terms of its new
| location. Chance in this respect is not simply a matter
I
of unknown outcomes faced by a subject but the measure to
which change has been produced, the degree to which the
subject has counteracted the tendencies toward the stabil-
!
J ization of given constraints.
j In art and literature, true "origin-ality" depends
I
on the distance the creating consciousness has placed
: between its movements from stabilized forms and constraints,
its dis-order or deliberate opposition in "a symmetrical
manner to pre-established order." Originality and chance
!
j are thus contingent upon one another. Accordingly, Rimbaud
|
1 declared that he found the disorder of his spirit the most
32
sacred part of himself.
94
The poetic consciousness is one that always strives
to escape the "world" of language. It is a consciousness
that is in constant rebellion with the impositions of lan
guage. Such a sense is seen in the words of Tristan Tzara,
I
1
Iwho states:
i
; I detest artifice and lies. I detest language
' which is only an artifice of thought. I detest
! thought which is a lie of living matter; life moves
outside of all hypocrisy, hypothesis; it's a lie
that we have accepted as a starting point for the
others.33
On the levels of life and literature, the only means to
originality is the escape from the:strictures that have been
established. In turn, the escape is effected, as Tzara
advocates, through the playing of one's life upon "the
itornado of every moment."
i
The eradication of choice in terms of rules coupled
jwith the absence of rules itself results in a shift in
I
(Perspective: valuation becomes impossible in the absence
I
of fixed frames of references; hence, the focus of atten-
!tion is forced upon the act of subversion in and of itself.
j , r
jIn this concentration, avant-gardism realizes not only the
|release from subjectivity, but works toward insuring
against the disappearance of human existence in the forest
jof human constructs. In terms of literature, the avant-
i
|garde task of retrieving human rights to the world is most
i
■obviously manifest in "talking for the sake of talking"
95
whereby the practical empiricism of language, designed to
project and communicate outside of itself* gives way in
stead to discourse that points to the successions of its
I
! own moments of creation and destruction. It is discourse
: that Poggioli sees as being "full of picturesque violence,
1 sparing neither person nor thing, made up of gestures and
| 34
I insults rather than of articulate discourse." For the
! avant-garde consciousness, the project in terms of estab-
I
lished culture amounts to "the killing of art," as Andre
Breton put it, of "removing privilege from the autumn of
words" to the point where the individual is able to succumb
completely to "the fanaticism of caprice and the mysteries
35
of seduction" by language. The yielding to the seduc-
| tion of new linguistic couplings is always one that must,
■ however, be tinged with the irony arising from a certain
, loss of innocence, namely, the innocence that supposes
i
| meaning and not a void underlies each linguistic sign or
construct that has been humanly devised. But the mind,
• once privy to the knowledge that signs only point to other
• signs, has participated in what Susan Sontag terms an act
i t
; of voyeurism that renders the belief in "man created by
f
j consciousness," hence the retrieval of his innocence,
quite impossible. Correspondingly, this loss of innocence
! leads to the loss of "art," for art has always been part
of the complicity to divert human attention from the void
by filling up the memory, according to Sontag, with
96
"all the words that have been said" and by "closing off
experience by hooking each experience onto the last."
The irony that attends the avant-garde conscious
ness as it engages in its explorations is that it contin-
I
1 ues, in full realization of the void, to fill the void with
! words or what Sontag terms "ontological stammerings" or
j "artistic babblings" without pretensions of operating under
i the sanction of Art or Values. There is, in other words,
|
a certain futility that must'be countenanced: not the
futility of an exhaustion of resources but "the prized and
defended vantage point for the athletic leap of conscious-
1 36
J ness into its own complexity." On the other hand, the
! edge of humour that tinges irony is also always present
I
i in the activities of avant-gardism and is seen by Tristan
I
Tzara as both the revenge on the part of the individual
against the entrapments humans are constantly setting them-
| selves up for as well as the liberating force that enables
i
, the necessary distancing from all that is stabilized and
| defined. The laughter of the writer who "talks for the
; sake of talking" is thus one of joy in the release into
[
"a consciousness with no tourniquet" although it is always
also touched with the memory of an innocence that amounted
i
to no more than "acts of humiliating obeisance to the im-
37
plantations m our heads."
To a large extent, the double-edged consciousness
of avant-gardism is seen to have permeated the literature
of the twentieth century in that modern and post-modern
fiction and poetry reflect the struggle of the writer
j
i against:
t
The accumulations of culture that have become
| part of what he is . . . [the wastes] of myths
I and allusions . . . technologies, cant styles,
| articulated modes of being which are the world's
semblance of logic, its pretense to solidity, its
projection of nature.38
Twentieth century literature, in severing itself from its
historical bearings, has imposed upon itself the impera
tive to go on creating in the face of a perspective that
I
■ i
i is so vast that the artist, according to Cioran, can no
| longer create with what he or she "knows." Creative in-
j tegrity, furthermore, sees "no recourse save an excursion
! into the unintelligible," where the artist discovers that
I
j "none of his words, in their legitimate acceptation has
i
i a future" hence his/her need to "fracture their meaning
I
39
[and to] court impropriety."
There is, Cioran believes, in this courtship, the
i
j first step toward deliverance from the Word. The horror
! that necessarily accompanies this turning away from words
!
; can neither be learnt nor communicated, Cioran adds, but
i
it does lead, if accompanied by the excursion into the
unintelligible, to a transcendence "as effective as those
j of the mystics," to "a madness that is not sacred,"
I 98
and finally to a conquest of this world "without recourse
40
to the Beyond."
The "mysticism" of twentieth century literature
is thus not in its pretensions of concealing an ultimate
I
; force but one that testifies to the mind's presence in its
l
' own cognitative obstacle course. This mystical phenomenon,
i
I as Cioran puts it, is always discontinuous: "it flourishes,
j
| achieves its apogee, then degenerates and ends in cari-
41
cature." By doing so, modern literature both presup
poses and produces a negation of time. With this negation,
a shift is produced as to the consideration that must be
| given the twentieth century text: for whereas traditional
! fiction and poetry, as correlatives of reality exist in
| (that is in the material finality) time and space, the
I :
| tentativeness of modern and post-modern works tends to
1 divest them of temporality and to indicate instead their
presence in the whole continuum of time. Hence in the
| movements of creation and destruction, both instantaneity
! and eternity are accomplished: envisioned, as Breton
I
I
, states, as presence by the text at its own conception,
I birth and death— text produced as a result of "words making
i
1 love." In writing, Breton thus advocated the need:
d'ecrire sans savoir ce que sont langue,
; verbe, comparaisons, changements d'idees, de
I ton; ni concevoir la structure de la duree de
' 1'oeuvre ni les conditions de sa fin: pas du
i tout le pourquoi, pas du tout le comment 1^2
I
99
Conversely, to write in order to represent or to
reorganize experience is "verdir, bleuir, blanchir d'etre
perroquet," that is, to be stifled eventually by the
density that repetition imposes upon words with every con-
| secutive utterance. In terms of traditional literature,
I repetition aspires toward permanence, that is the iiranor-
t
| talization of forms in time. But in aspiring for perma-
i
j nence, the work must necessarily surrender its vitality,
i
pretend though it may, that its aims, are toward the cele
bration of human existence. Permanence thus becomes a
closure that works against the assertion of human presence
in the creative enterprise as well as against the prolif
eration of creative possibilities.
! In Breton's contention that he could only love
| unaccomplished things, there is the consciousness that
i
| linguistic systems continually resist human efforts at
I limiting them to function as reality co-ordinates. For
i
with every linguistic utterance, a threat is posed against
the system of which it is a part. Since humans are unable,
! when using linguistic signs, to apprehend the configura-
: tive activities of the signified and the signifier at the
! same instance, every lapse that follows threatens the
stability of the language system in the efforts that fol-
j low to reconcile the sign to its constitutive parts.
■ Additionally, this adjustment tends to strain the
I
!
i
! 100
established limits of language systems. It is this strain
against the finitudes of language, however, that consti
tutes literature, for:
The whole struggle of literature is in fact
I an effort to escape from the confines of language
[as it struggles] to say something it does not
i know how to say, something that cannot be said,
something it does not know, something that cannot
I be known,4 3
! In the face of this, twentieth century literature
J serves as its own platform for its ontological struggle,
its combinatorial and agonistic play requiring, however,
the expansiveness that only the open-ended form and style
can afford it. In conjunction with this perspective,
there is "no room," therefore, "for invention, there is
, no possibility of truth or untruth. There is only this
i
44
: world, constantly from one horizon to the other."
I Avant-gardism, the realization of limits and the
i desire that constantly attempts the testing of these lim
its, has bequeathed to modern literature the urgent need
to revolt against the reconstitutive aspects of creation.
| Rather than articulating sense from within established
j boundaries, there is, instead, the aim envisioned by both
i
j Breton and Aragon at evoking reality by articulating it.
"Qu'est-ce qui me retient de brouiller l'ordre
des mots, d'attenter de cette maniere a 1'existence toute
45
I apparante des choses?" Breton inquired, to which
101
has come the response of more recent writers that nothing
essentially obstructs the creative path since:
[There are] no limits beyond the writer's
power of imagination, and beyond the possibili
ties of language. Everything can be said, and
must be said, in any possible way [including]
the story of the story [the writer] is telling,
the story of the language he is manipulating,
the story of the methods he is u s i n g . 46
i There is, in this reflexive strategy, "a cadenced
! and self-measuring performance" that is unconcerned with
i
the sacred cows such as "Master Pieces" or "Monuments"
that it leaves in its trail. These, the avant-garde con
sciousness knows, will "be destined inevitably to become
somebody else's convenience, and finally not so much
4 7
caviar as waste." The concern of the avant-garde is
j focused on the production of materiality by mind and mate-
; riality's subsequent return to mind. Literature, in this
! light, is only a vestigial trace of this process that
j constantly seems poised on the promise of delivering up
| completed meanings.
! It is in the absence of completed sense that tra-
■ ditional criticism, armed with its definitive ends, en-
I
! counters its own limitations: it can and does recuperate
| on any level it chooses to designate, but it cannot ascribe
I
j its discoveries to texts that "contain" nothing, as it
! were, save the evidence of their own ontological struggle.
102
The critical enterprise itself consists of three
fundamental phases: the confrontation of the reciproca
tions within the text, the transaction between the text
and the reader, and finally, the lexical representation
I of the two earlier phases. But each successive phase re-
; presents a removal from the initial confrontation— the
| critical consciousness is no longer engaged in the con-
!
frontation with the moments of the text but with those of
the preceding stage of its own production. Traditional
criticism (or Normal Criticism as Hayden White terms it)
rooted in the perspective that sees critical discourse as
the means of sense production, gives no consideration as
to either the processes inherent in a text or to those
constitutive of its own production. As a mirror image of
■ literature that professes to mean, Normal Criticism must
! stand isolated in its own completed state from that with
I
I
which it pretends an association if it is to make sense.
But the making of sense, as Nietzsche put it, is simply
a matter of employing the metaphors with which one is most
I
familiar. Normal Criticism, operating under the scien
tific imperative, cannot countenance the threat to systems
I
| that gives rise to the production of meaning; it must, in
f
| other words, obliterate the signs of its struggle both at
the level of its confrontation with the text as well as
i at the level of its agonistic engagement of its own pro-
i
duction.
103
If it is to mean, Normal Criticism must preserve
its favoured metaphors or the systems that lend justifica
tion to its activity. It must be an enterprise of polished
surfaces where all dissenting voices give way to the mon-
! otonous drone of Authority. But in this emphasis on its
I
: completed state, there is, in Normal Criticism, a funda-
I mental dishonesty, a prudery that seeks to keep the con-
; ception, birth and death of human cogitation under the
i
wraps of good manners,
j For the "creatic," motivated by the avant-garde
J consciousness, on the other hand, there is the realization
that the completed critical piece, like the completed text
; is no more than one dream amongst many. Critics and
: artists have always attempted to "impose order on the
j ;
| chaotic multiplicity of the world . . . rather than to be
I 4 8
I part of it." But capturing the world m the attempt to
j imbue it on human terms is always done at the risk of
| self-entrapment. With this realization, the avant-garde
I critic is able to forsake the "good manners" of Normal
|
| Criticism, the postures that befit the producers of ob-
, jects of scholarship. What he/she aspires instead is the
i
conjunction that he/she establishes with the world and
! the text. The avant-garde critic leaves the door of his/
j her imaginative workshop— clutter, confusion and all—
! open.
104
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER 3
■''Gabriel Desire Laverdant, De la mission de l'art
i et du rdle des artistes (Paris, 1848) quoted in Poggioli,
p. 9.
I 2
j Renato Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans.
by Gerald Fitzgerald (Cambridge, Massachussetts: The
Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 28.
3
In his article "Literary Criticism and Its Dis
contents," Critical Inquiry, Vol. 3, No. 2 (Winter, 1976),
pp. 203-220, Geoffrey Hartman terms critics guided by the
avant-garde consciousness the "New Revisionists." Hartman
includes the new hermeneuticists in this category and
! names Paul de Man, J. Hillis-Miller, Harold Bloom,
j Jacques Derrida and himself as part of this movement in
| criticism. The term avant-garde itself is used in the
j closing portion of this paper where Hartman questions as
j to whether "this avant-garde criticism [constitutes] a
rearguard humanism," p. 219. Hartman stresses that
"diversity is one reason why no one can agree on what to
name this latest grouping of critics," p. 212, but the
term Avant-Garde Critic was used to designate the critical
activities of Hartman, Edward Said, Ihab Hassan and William
Empson who appeared together on a panel on Avant-Garde
j Criticism at the Modern Language Association's annual
i convention in New York in December, 1976.
I
; 4
Hayden White, The Absurdist Movement m Contem
porary Literary Theory," Contemporary Literature, Vol. 17,
| No. 3 (Summer, 1976), p. 380.
5
Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, p.
i 6
Ortega y Gasset, Man and People, trans.
R. Trask (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., Inc.,
i p. 39 .
i
I 7 .
j Ibid., pp. 38-39.
' 8
I Richard Palmer, Hermeneutics (Evanston:
| western University Press, 1969), p. 124.
1 105
25.
by Willard
1957) ,
North-
I
9
Albert Camus, The Rebel (New York: Vintaqe Books,
1959) .
"^Palmer, Hermeneutics, p. 125.
I ^Ortega y Gasset, Man and People, pp. 41-46.
; Human existence takes on the appearance of "an enemy who
shows himself or makes himself apparent, energetically
blocking our way, that is resisting us and at the same
• time affirming himself, making himself firm, before us and
, against us," p. 41.
12
; Richard Poirier, The Performing Self: Composi-
! tions and Decompositions in the Language of Contemporary
’ Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971),
; p. 12.
! 13
! Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 39.
I ^Ibid.
j "^Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (New York:
: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 142-166.
17
Tristan Tzara, "Dada Manifesto," in Tristan Tzara:
Approximate Man and Other Writings, trans. by Mary Ann Caws
! (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973), p. 155.
18
! Friedrich Nietzsche, "Of the Use and Misuse of
j History for Life," in Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight,
| pp. 146-147.
! 19
Poirier, The Performing Self, p. xiii.
i 20
i "Written poetry has value for one single moment
! and should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make room for
j the living . . . the time for masterpieces is past."
I Artaud. "You can't lug the corpse of your father all over
j the place." Apollinaire. "Art consists of forms we leave
behind in our effort to keep up with ourselves, define
i ourselves, create ourselves as we move along." Sukenick.
21
I E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, trans. by
I Richard Howard (New York: Quadrangle/The New York Times
| Book Co., 1976), p. 44.
106
22
Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 36.
23
Lucien Goldmann, Cultural Creation m Modern
Society, trans. by Bart Grahl (St. Louis: Telos Press,
' 1976.
i 24
, Jean Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans.
; by Hazel Barnes (New York: Philosophical Library, Inc.,
1956), pp. 580-581.
■ 25
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. by
; Walter Kaufman (New York: Random House, 1974), p. 130.
26
| John Barth, Lost in the Fun House (New York:
; Doubleday, 1968), p. 104.
i 27
j Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 29.
| 28
Andre Malraux, La Tentation de 1'Occident (Paris:
Gallimard, 1970), Vol. I, p. 59.
29
Wylie Sypher, Loss of Self in Modern Literature
and Art (New York: Vintage Books, 1962), p. 129.
30
! Novalis in Styles of Radical Will by Susan Sontag
' (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1976), p. 26.
i
31
Jochen Gerz, "Toward a Language of Doing," in
Surfiction, ed. by Raymond Federman (Chicago: The Swallow
; Press, Inc., 1975), p. 279.
; 32
Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 56.
j 33
1 Tristan Tzara, Approximate Man, p. 23.
34
Poggioli, Theory of the Avant-Garde, p. 37.
35
Andre Breton, m Theater in Dada and Surrealism,
by J. H. Matthews (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University
Press, 1974), p. 86.
3 6
Susan Sontag, Styles of Radical Will, (New York:
Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 1976), p. 23.
37 . .
Poirier, The Performing Self, p. 11.
38TK.„
Ibid.
39
E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, p. 145.
107
4^E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, pp. 181,
164.
41Ibid., p. 158.
i 4 2 --
Andre Breton, "Notes sur la poesie," in La
! revolution surrealiste, No. 12 (December, 1929) , p. 54.
4 3
Italo Calvino, "Myth in Narrative," in Sur-
■ fiction, ed. by Raymond Federman (Chicago: Swallow Press,
; 1975) , p. 77.
; ^Maurice Cagnon and Stephen Smith, "J.M.G. Le
; Clezio: Fiction's Double Bind," in Surfiction, ed. by
j Raymond Federman (Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975), p. 216.
i 4 5
I Andre Breton, Point du jour (Paris: Gallimard,
; 1934), pp. 25-26.
46
Raymond Federman, "Surfiction," m Surfiction
(Chicago: Swallow Press, 1975), p. 12.
4 7
Poirier, The Performing Self, p. 11.
4 8
, Violet Hovarth, Andre Malraux (New York: New
; York University Press, 1969), p. 150.
108
PART TWO: IHAB HASSAN
j CHAPTER 4
J
i
i
VISION
I
, It is when men insist on immortality, in
history or in eternity, that they engage in
; their blackest betrayals.
The rest is silence, it is because in
silence all our connections may be wholly re
covered.
- Ihab Hassan
According to Leslie Fiedler, every age displays
I
• its awareness of certain functions of literature while re-
I
! maining biind to others. Up until the 1960s, criticism
in America concerned itself with "legitimizing certain
[functions of literature] and disavowing others." This,
i
: Fiedler adds, was done in the hopes of inuring to them
selves, that is to the critics, the exhilaration of litera-
1 ture's "bewildering, almost inexhaustibly various func
tions" of which they had felt unjustly deprived. In 1965,
however, Fiedler observed the emergence of a new awareness
| — the awareness that if literature did not actually invent
| itself and its own time, it at least collaborated in its
I
i invention. It was an awareness of the fact writers no
| longer simply created but were party to actually witnessing
i
| 109
I ___________________________________ ____________________________________________
I
I
themselves in the processes of creation. In the light of
this, Fiedler was correct to have gauged that the humani
ties had reached a critical turning point which was akin
to the new consciousness of the Renaissance.^"
What this new awareness has effected is essentially
a shift in focus: no longer is the created object as
object the pivotal point of attention. Instead, the con
stitutive processes that engage the creating perspective
now hold the attention of the postmodern critic. For
where literature's chief function had been that of pre
serving, and to a certain extent, perpetuating the past,
the primary concern of postmodernism is the validation of
human inventiveness.
The self-watching creator is certainly not a post
modern phenomenon: Flaubert's agony over be mot juste is
the most frequently cited example of the writer who is no
longer concerned with the work as object, with the total
ity of his/her work of art. Likewise, Dante's commen
taries in La Vita Nuova, Raymond Roussel's Comment j'ai
ecrit certaines des mes livres and Robbe-Grillet's Pour
un nouveau roman galvanize the attention to the fact that
the poem, the novel or the painting is always an end point
at least where each creator is concerned. But the pro
cedures that constitute a work and the apprehension of
these processes are at once the artist's affirmation of
110
his/her own creativity as well as that of a continuum of
all artistic creations. By focusing on the processes that
go into his/her creation, the artist participates in self
creation; he/she is never separate from his/her work and
' consequently never lost in the collective category of
! "Art."
| This is essentially a consciousness that necessar-
' ily disengages itself from "the tradition of the human as
the West has defined it, [from] Humanism itself . . . and
2
more especially, the cult of reason." The disengagement
seemed sufficiently radical to Fiedler to have prompted
his use of the epithet "Mutants" for those whom he saw
as taking "under their own power into outer (inner) space"
I
j in search of new epistemological territories.
1 The participatory function of the artist in post-
[
: modern literature renders him/her much more than simply
the creator of a work of art; he/she is a mutant in the
sense that his/her self-reflexiness necessitates his/her
i functioning as creator, parent/originator, synthesizer/
j
destroyer, critic and explorer, and above all, self
watcher. In the literary climate of self-watching, it
was perhaps inevitable that the parallel sense of reflex
iveness should have arisen in the field of literary criti-
i
| cism since criticism, functioning under the same humanis-
: tic dictums of art, found it difficult to deal with works
which were constituted under a different set of operatives.
Ill
These literary mutants, in other words, have pro
pagated, since Fiedler's pronouncements, "mutants" of their
own, namely those critics who are regarded today as the
avant-garde critics. Amongst their number, Ihab Hassan
^ may well be considered one of the first born of postmodern-
! ism's union with the waning powers of literary criticism.
His vision, shaped analogously to the perspectives of
twentieth century writers, has given rise to critical (?)
directions that extend well beyond the traditional func
tions and aims of literary criticism as prescribed by the
j humanistic tradition. Essentially, his work is both the
'
awareness of the reflexiveness of epistemological activi-
; ties and the field upon which this reflexiveness is enacted.
1 ■ I
i But if the execution of Hassan's awareness in terms of his |
! ;
j discursive medium has only been made manifest in more
i recent years (most particularly in his Paracriticisms),
i
I the vision itself is seen to have coalesced even his early
i
i
essays.
In his article "Beyond a Theory of Literature:
(
: Intimations of Apocalypse?" written in 1964, Hassan stated
j that "a new breed of American critics are anxious to assert
I themselves against the rigors and pieties they have inher
ited," adding that the mood of this new breed was "rest
less, eclectic, speculative; sometimes . . . even apoca-
3
lyptic." The object of these critics was "the enduring
112
!search for wholeness and vitality in the literary response."
With this last, which cogently acknowledges a parallel,
creative force at work in the act of reading, the corner
!stone of avant-garde criticism was established.
i
t
In this same essay, the avant-garde articulation
■ of the "paradoxical desire to appropriate literature to
I the dream life" of humans that will see expression in
Hassan's later works is expressed. For in his question as
to whether it is not "the secret task for poet and critic
alike to participate in that magic process whereby the word
4 ,
is made into flesh." Hassan poses the question as to the
implications constructs of awareness have upon literature
and the shaping of human life. That the premise is couched
;in a question subtly affirms somehow the conviction that
I
the secret task involving the very corporality of the
reader is one that is antithetical to the traditional dis-
i
i
tance that is established between reader and text. In this
respect, "participation" and "process," words that are
I identified with the general temper of postmodernism, pro-
! vide Hassan with the keys to his own critical vision and
practices.
Hassan's vision of reading largely parallels that
| of Poulet's in the sense that there is the common belief
i
| that knowledge of the text is never an "out there" to be
i
\ . ,
j grasped at will. There is, in reading, only a participatory
113
involvement that re-enacts the constitution of the text,
an engagement where the solidity of "knowing" the text—
literally grasping the matter at hand— gives way to the
awareness as to the tenousness of the reading process and
of the re-creation of the work as it is read. For Hassan,
j as it is with Poulet, the reading process is:
i
| A process [that is] extremely vulnerable,
; vulnerable, likely to go astray at any moment,
one always threatened with error and aberration,
risking paralysis or self-destruction and for
ever obliged to start again on the road that
it had hoped to have covered.5
In contrast, there is a calculated ease to the
' detachment of traditional criticism: placing the object
i
i
; of observation at a distance from oneself, one is able to
i
| extrapolate data from it. But in the reduction of the
i
i text to the status of object (whether "for dissection or
I
knowledge, idolatory or classification"), true knowledge
i
! of the text will always "remain locked, a private outrage,
; an inner wound" for as long as the critic insists on the
I 6
I "right to privacy or detachment."
I
Traditional criticism's purely pragmatic drive
toward the recovery of knowledge and hence the stabiliza-
j tion of the text thus extends the tradition that works to-
!
I
ward the preservation of a past. For to know in the tra-
! ditional sense is to know that which has been. Only facta,
according to Betrand de Jouvenal, can be known, hence
7
positive knowledge can be had only of things past.
114
To a large degree, then, the traditional novel, dealing
as it does with a time removed from the reader's own pres
ent beingness, affords appropriate material to be recovered
as facta, and it is in the retrieving of facta that tradi
tional criticism in a sense becomes as much an object as
' the text it attempts to objectify.
i
i The participation in the processes that render the
' word flesh, that is, the permutations that ultimately link
printed matter to grey matter, cannot be translated, how
ever, in terms of the knowledge that traditional criticism
demands. For traditional criticism operates on the prem-
i
ise that knowledge exists as a donnee to be subjugated,
appropriated or absorbed under the aegis of its own ref-
! erence frames. Knowledge, as traditional criticism knows
! it, is fixed and the procedures that work toward the re-
i
! trieval of facta finally cannot be used where the "dia
logue" which Hassan sees as taking place in the reading
; activity is concerned. Such a dialogue, Hassan adds, in-
, volves "the difficult reciprocities of love." It demands
j not an object but a presence "moving and participating in
i reality." It is this dialogue, this participation in
j the text that perhaps truly constitutes knowledge, for
t
i as Foucault states, knowledge is finally a "field of co-
! ordination and subordination of statements in which con-
i 9
j cepts appear are defined, applied and transformed." In
115
the reading field where the exchanges take place between
text and reader, furthermore, an accurate or appropriate
discursive practice must be constituted, for as Foucault
i
! adds, no knowledge exists "without a particular discursive
i practice."1* ^
For Hassan, the dialogue of reading cannot, in
all honesty, be rendered in terms of a discourse designed
! with the recuperation of the past, that is, in terms of
facta, since the reading encounter engages the present/
presence of the reader and the text. The dialogue of read
ing must have as its representation a discourse governed
by the recognition of the coordinations, subordinations
and transformations which take place in the reading engage
ment. With such a recognition, the act of criticism be
comes necessarily one of self-judgement demanding the com-
| mitment, the response-ability, if one would, of the critic
!
I according to Hassan. Ultimately, criticism becomes, in
I this instance, is a mode of self-testifying requiring "a
i spontaneity of judgement which reaches beyond itself."1' 1 '
Furthermore, criticism is no longer the retrieving of
"knowledge" from a text but the actual participation the
| arena of knowledge. In such a participation the norms
’ and expectations of normal criticism are set aside in
I
i favor of what Hassan sees as the need for action. Specif-
I
i ically, there is the need to consider the personal aspect
!
I 116
of the reading subject to the extent that attention is
to be paid to his/her change as a result of his/her en
counter with the text. Such a change, according to Hassan,
must involve the alteration in the very recesses of the
reader's imagination to such a point that his/her actions
I ^ 2
1 in life become different from what they have been.
| In such a position, one recognizes the divergence
from traditional postures which emphasize the separations
between the art and life, between criticism and text, and
13
between criticism and life itself. In Hassan's view,
art, life and the critic are inseparable: they are all
j
| constitutive of each other and move at the instigation of
|
j "the female principle [that symbolizes] acceptance and
!
[ fusion and the enveloping wholeness of things." According
I
j to Hassan, it is the so-called "Cartesian madness of the
! west" that insists upon the dichotomies between subject
. and object, art and life, reality and the imaginative, etc.
! *
J Such dichotomies become "the source of the mind's aliena-
I
i tion" and have fostered the governing perspective that is
| unable, where criticism is concerned, to effect a recon-
i
i
j ciliation between subject and object, present and past,
1 art and life. Criticism, has of necessity, thus been re-
, duced to an activity of fact gathering. But according to
i de Jouvenal, the individual who is a "fact collector is
j at the opposite pole from the man of action." The man
117
or woman of action is interested in facta only as it pre
sumes futurum, that is, "as raw material out of which the
14
mind makes estimates of the future." It is in this re-
’ spect that Hassan's critical perspective, and, consequently,
, his blend of creative and critical discourse, can be shown
as being identifiable with avant-gardism in the arts.
; Fundamentally, it is the twentieth century artist's aware-
; ness as to the ability of the human imagination to create
world upon world without having to validate the authen
ticity of any one particular world. It is the awareness
that no longer asks, as writers and critics prior to 1958
i
j did, as to how the individual is to interpret this world
I
! of which he/she is a part, for in the face of several
I realities the postmodern questions are more likely to be
I
I "which world is this? What is to be done in it and which J
! 15
I of my selves is to do with it?"
I
t
| Which world, which of my selves--the articulation
alone shatters assumptions as to the mutually exclusive
distinctions as to self and the world that have been
i fostered by western humanism. What the postmodern per-
1 spective provides instead is the notion of a perpetual
j cycle of reciprocations between selves and created worlds
j where all that is created struggles "for position against
i
what is emerging and will emerge." Such a cycle may be
seen as a movement of the human spirit breaking apart
118
from itself within its own creations according to Cassirer.
Where the movement breaks itself upon its creations,
Cassirer adds, it does tend, however, to find itself
"forced and stimulated toward new effort, in which it dis-
I
covers new and unknown powers." In religion (which might
1 be said to be the desire to break out of the world’s con-
i structs) Cassirer sees the movement of the human spirit's
! collision upon it religious structures as cause for the
! i c
j "growth and strengthening of the subjective and personal.
i
! The contention can be made that art and culture
undergo analogous collisions against established standards:
for as much as literature functions in terms of the sta
bilizing effects of linguistic constraints or formal de-
* signates, genuine innovation involves collisions upon
j these limitations, as well as the tensions that are estab-
! lished as the "new" or the "innovative" strike against the
I
j acceptable or "normal." In this respect, art can never
I be an end, as Morse Peckham has pointed out, but is, in-
i stead, the "rehearsal for the orientation which makes in-
' 17
novation possible."
i
I
1 On the other hand, the humanistic glorification
; of art as valuable objects has always tended to ignore the
; movements of change involved in the constituting of art.
i
| Governed by what Gombrich termed the "Greek miracle" or
I
the existence of a provisional, though fictive, reality
119
that stands in the middle realm between the strategies of
myth and the "terrifying world of uncontrolled imagina
tion," art acquired an autonomy that resulted in the pro-
i
1 ductions that never consciously ventured from its will to
(
1 re-present a given reality. In this regard, the humanist
! is always the student of "products (my emphasis) of human
1 thought, reason and will," Hayden White notes. He/she is
i
i
subject to reference frames ratified by history, society
or culture and is necessarily opposed to the "dream in
the name of which man dared to demand something better
i than the hand dealt them by genetic or social forces."
' Such an opposition employs in turn, the strategy of seeing
i
; art in terms of facta for in doing so humanists insure
! themselves the roles of custodians and mediators "between
I
I 18
J the powers engaged in the social and cultural drama."
In terms of the dichotomous thought model of human-
f
! ism, all dreams, by virtue of the shifts they effect from
I
i given reference frames, amount to rebellion. For a critic
i
J like Hassan, "dreaming" amounts to the recognition of the
I
; imagination's capacity to in effect demand "something
i
| better," of all creative limitations, to countenance change
j
and the absence of foci that tend to "claim (for both
i writers and critics) extraordinary authority in the deter
mination of what may count as legitimate art or thought."
; Hassan's commitment is thus to the organic nature of
! thought and its manifestations both in art and criticism.
With such a commitment, the traditional notion of criti
cism’s dependency on the priority of literature is placed
i
I in doubt: in the epistemological chain, literature as an
i
imaginative construct both motivates and/or supplements
1 the field of thought. Hence, "the necessity of a special
' group of scholars whose specific task is to exercise cus-
: todial and critical functions for an audience which views
19
j its opinions as authoritative" is challenged and the
|
I questions that are raised in the light of this are not only
"why the critic" but the whole question as to how criticism
that counters the humanistic tradition will in effect con
duct itself.
Given the pervading strength of humanistic perspec-
! tives, the enterprise of a critic who is governed by the
1 avant-garde consciousness is inevitably characterized by
, metaphors of violence. For avant-gardism, according to
; Hassan, is "will and energy turned inside out . . . dis-
| covery through suicide." The violence that is manifest
\
t
; is directed at both the external impositions of culture
i
i
, as well as against the self since it is only through this
| explosion in two directions can there be a preparation for
the rebirth of the new. The rebellion, as Hassan views it,
; is thus "metaphysical revolt and metaphysical surrender,"
its activity motivated by the desire for nothingness or
I 121
the convergence of self and the world in a universe exempt
20
from the chatter and clutter of the past.
If the postmodern consciousness cannot or has not
as yet been able to accept the "absurdity . . . the obscene
I
; coporality of death . . . the mystical anarchy and organ-
I ized nothingness" it is promised, nevertheless, the affir-
I
j mations of "self and of life" that "heroes of yore did not
(
j envision" seeing as such that "the existential self modern
literature reveals is one that reaches out to new condi
tions [even as it recoils] to preserve a radical kind of
„ 21
innocence.
For Hassan, the postmodern sensibility is one that
recognizes the fallen state of the human imagination. The
!
j imagination, as Norman O. Brown expressed it, fell into
i
| language and having sinned (not so much, we might add,
|
from eating of the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil
i
| as from having named as Adam did the flora and fauna of
t
\ Eden) humans are ultimately doomed to death by fiction,
i The hope of regaining the lost paradise for an avant-garde
! critic like Hassan is in the retrieving of the sense of
i
I
authenticity amidst the sea of structures. To such an end,
the avant-garde critic directs him/herself first to the
task of clearing the paths of language, "the deepest habit
of the mind, our most thorough inheritance from the dead
»
* 22
! or vanished order." The authenticity of language using
i
i
I 122
humans becomes evident, in other words, only as humans
realize the limitations of the historically weighted nature
of words and can comprehend the extent and the modes by
i
^ which the human consciousness is entrapped by thought sys-
I
, tems.
' Ultimately, the task of clearing the paths of lan-
l
; guage must include the releasing of language from its func-
i
tionary aspects for it is this characteristic of language
that Norman 0. Brown sees as constituting the "denial of
23
the living organ of experience." Not human experience,
in other words, but the habits of language imposing them- '
selves upon life are seen by a critic like Hassan as having
furthered the fall of humans. Language has imposed itself
i »
! so thoroughly upon life that it passes itself off as life
| or experience. The attempt at managing reality through
' the use of constructs amounts to a conformity, a self
entrapment that Richard Poirier sees as "a characteristic
of death." In contrast, the disruptive activity of avant-
i
I garde critics may be seen as characteristic of life, "the
! revelation of differences of a tensed variety that makes
every element aware of every other and especially of it-
i
: 24
j self, of its unique and authentic shape." By disengag
ing him/herself from the formalities of language, the
avant-garde critic, according to Hassan, is thus able to
; engage in the larger hopes of changing consciousness and
i
i
123
25
to thus "banish death from Our midst." Similarly, from
the critical standpoint, Hassan abandons traditional strat
egies and aims out of what might be termed a figurative
"disgust" as to the formalized status of art. In rhetori-
^ cally questioning if such a disgust "could be disgust for
j the human sphere as such, for reality [or] for life," the
| postmodern critic can only attest, as did Ortega y Gassett,
j to the contrary— it is the respect for life that motivates
i
his disgust, a respect that is unwilling to confuse life
2 6
with so inferior a thing as art.
j A contingent part of this disgust over art is
Hassan's acknowledgement of the "silence" that twentieth
century literature envisions language and literature as
■ 1
> encompassing. In terms of Hassan1s work, silence becomes j
I
j the central metaphor for the distrust that the postmodern
I
! consciousness evinces as to intellection via the human
i
i senses. By both affirming the metaphor of silence and
I
: denying the reliability of the senses, Hassan relinquishes,
j once and for all, the right of the critic to mediate be-
1 tween the real (that which is perceivable through the
I senses) and the imagined. By doing so, Hassan thus joins
the ranks of those who seek the conflation of fictive
| truth, or of "an absolute conceptual certitude," with "the
I chaos of unprocessed sense data." The radicalism of such
a desire (one that is seen by Hayden White as being far
i
124
more intensive than that of the avant-gardism of the past)
lies in the attack that such an aim launches against logi
cal thought procedures that have, traditionally, isolated
intellection via the senses from intellectual activities.
|
! For Hassan, neither traditional logic, "that sense of pro-
i
visional certitude that makes the orderly and incremental
I 27
| development of reality possible," nor "the chaos of un
processed sense data" are reliable on their own terms.
The metaphor of silence is also used as a gesture
of rebellion against formal logic. For Hassan, refraining
from articulating the tenets of logic is another appeal
on behalf of human authenticity. The need for the twen-
j tieth century consciousness' extrication from logic is
1
viewed as an "apocalypse" that must penetrate the "per
plexities of the moment to the heart of light" even as it
| must provide such an extrication with "mirror images" of
i
i
; its own workings. It is, finally, in these mirrors of the
! imagination that Hassan senses that "something vital and
I 2 8
: dangerous in our experience" may be found.
i
The suggestion that the acquisition of knowledge
| can in fact be effected by circumventing the normal route
(that is, through the incremental and developmental pro-
| gression from sense data to knowledge arrived at as a
i
J result of inference or deduction) is, for Hassan, the first
1 step toward penetrating the "perplexities" that tend to
I
I 125
obliterate life in that it constitutes a denial of the
premise that the human senses are reliable sources of in
formation. Logical structures can, in other words, inter
fere with sensual perceptions in that they are able to
i
1 filter out sense data that cannot be accomodated within
1 the limitations it has designated. The postmodernistic
I "ere du soupgon" is thus the era that doubts the certainty
' of the reality postulated by the west that "could be seen,
smelt, heard and touched [or] thought of spontaneously as
limited to the reaches of sensorial experience." The
human senses, as Buckminster Fuller has pointed out, are
totally inadequate where the apprehension of reality is
concerned: "ninety-nine and ninety-nine one-hundredths
<
‘ percent of events which constitute the physical and meta-
! physical universe are undetectable directly by the
I ,.29
j senses.
!
The treachery of culture and history for the post
modern thinker like Hassan is thus in their capitalization
of the human senses as a viable means of apprehending
reality even as they mediate the extent to which what ap-
| portionments of reality may be seen, heard, felt, etc.
i
i
| But if postmodernism is aware of this treachery, "deep
I down," Hassan points out, "man always disavows the reality
i
! 3 0
! his hands touch and his eyes see," sensing, in the ac
ceptance of such a reality, an act that amounts somewhat
126
to that of self-blinding or mutilation. Figuratively
crippled or blinded, humans thus bring about the "delib
erate exclusion from consideration of a large proportion
of the environmental events [internal and external]" that
i
1 enable the apprehension of what Fuller terms the "funda-
! mental evolutionary trendings implicit in the non-simul-
t
i 31
taneous continuity of our total experience." In terms
of literature, the exclusion of the processes, both on
the part of the writer and the reader, that takes place
in the constituting of the text, has given rise to a sub
stitution: not process but a substantiable reality is
given a central position in the study of literature. But
every substitution is necessarily a lie; in the words of
j J. Hillis Miller, the postmodern consciousness grasps the
fact that literature is a sham in that "it captures in its
subtle pages not the reality of darkness but its verbal
I 32
■ image." As an activity, the making of literature is
I
J thus always a substitutive enterprise: the written word an
! attempt to substitute in material terms the verbal sound-
I
1 ings in air, and language and writing, in turn, the attempt
i
: at substituting relevance for nondifferentiated human ex-
!
| periences. The function of literature has thus always
been that of distracting the awareness via its constructs
away from "the reality of darkness." By doing so, it en-
i
i
; dows itself with a solidity that enables it its elevation
i
I
l 127
to the status of "literary culture." But this same solid
ity of literature has, in postmodern times; served to sug
gest the obverse side of itself. For if literature,
i through its substitutive powers speaks, there is also, for
the postmodern critic, the overwhelming silence that pro
claims itself above the strata of fictive constructs.
"Deep down," according to Hassan, "where things are stark
I yet fearfully deceptive, man always [has invented] his
gods." By the same token, Hassan adds, man has also shown
33
the propensity to become the gods he invents.
I
j To a large extent, the affirmation of silence on
i
j the part of the postmodern critic represents a certain
| coming of age. For it is only with the recognition of the
negative side to literature and language can the aim of
implicating the study of literature- in the freeing of the
i
I imagination from its limitations be effected. For Hassan,
l
I this liberation is envisioned as one that will enable the
! imagination to free itself to the extent that it will be
I able to continually reach out beyond every successive con-
1 struct that it devises. It is the adventure of the human
j imagination, holding only a candle, as futurist Fred
Pollack puts it, but going out bravely into unknown uni-
J verses. But silence, the central metaphor of postmodernism
i
j turns also upon the past even as it indicates the possi
bilities of future inventions. It is, according to Hassan,
|
i
! 128
"the stress in art, culture and consciousness," the con
sciousness of consciousness that is not altogether without
a voice in that it "whispers a new life" and is apocalyptic
| , 34 .
I in spirit." The rebellion of silence is thus the refusal
; of systems and their dictates, a detachment from the world
1 and its meanings. It is a detachment that Fiedler sees
, as having religious overtones. The view coincides with
! Hassan's assertion as to the postmodern bent toward "auto-
i destruction and self-transcendance" through this detachment
I
from the world and its power to mean. But if silence
"turns upon" or rebels against systems, its activity is
imbued with both mystical and revolutionary implications,
for according to Jean Paulhan, it is the knowledge that
| literature "can no longer carry the burden of conscious-
35
ness . . . that culture can neither mediate nor contain"
that constitutes "terrorism" or the demands that the indi
vidual in revolt makes on his own behalf when confronted
by the solidarity of systems. It is the terror or language,
Hassan notes, that leads to silence and "the Terrorist,
above all is a 'misologue.'"
The tradition of silence, according to Blanchot,
I begins with Rousseau, the man of letters who waged war
against letters. Since Rousseau's subversion, Blanchot
i
: adds, literature has headed and will continue to move
, toward a vanishing point or toward a meaning-less "ere
129
36
sans mots" where silence will give rise to new sounds.
In Blanchot's affirmation of silence, de Man points out,
a vision of a cosmos that is reduced to a point of indeter
minism is indicated as an end point; this, according to
! 37
Blanchot, will be "la neutrality identique du gouffre."
j In view of this tendency, de Man points out, every strate-
j gem of language has always been a means of protecting
i
"ourselves from the negative power." But what in effect
occurs, de Man states, is that "the existence of these
strategies [only] reveal the supremacy of the negative
3 8
power [that these strategies] try to circumvent."
For Blanchot and Hassan, the subversion that began
with Rousseau and continued through the avant-garde tradi-
| tion of the twentieth century has yet to see its ultimate
i
j moment. But "to the talkative heirs of Socrates, silence
is the one offence that never wears out that can never
39
become fashionable" for as long as we talk to mean or
engage in discourse that aims at telling. The "ere sans
mots" envisioned by both Hassan and Blanchot will engage,
however, a consciousness of "the dissolution of the known
i
I world, its history and persistence" even as it "sustains
I . 4 0
I a millenial vision of non-human perfection."
The tradition of silence that has its origins in
j literature from Sade through Beckett is seen by Hassan as
I
| encompassing far more than the field of literary study.
What the works of these "waiters of indeterminacy" have
instigated is a slippage or gap in the "forms of our appre
hension in the possibilities of our life" to such a degree
that postmodern humans must face, Hassan observes, "new
i
rigors of mortality." But if this mortality suggests the
i
|negation of the world and the self, there is also the posi-
I
itive aspect to silence in that it suggests the emergence
i
I of a "positive stillness," self-transcendence and sacred
plenitude. In Sade's incarceration from reality, for
instance, Hassan sees the "hollow silence of autism" that
ultimately signifies true freedom of the consciousness
"spinning loose of history, trying to twist free of words
'and things.
' i
I
; The freedom from meaning and the pragmatic ends I
of language must, consequently, lead to the silence of
I anti-language, the "abuse of common speech." Here, the
,aim of such a "language" would be to "transform words into
Jsemantic absence and [to] unloosen the grammar of conscious-
4 2
ness." If function entails the reduction of things to
;certain states of being, then unloosening the grammar of
I consciousness is seen as the liberation of language into
4 3
fresh aesthetic possibilities. Jarry's repugnance that
j characterizes the postmodern sensibility enables at the
:same time the imagination's invasion of the void, hence,
i
"wide-eyed, the postmodern spirit sees everything— or
i
131
nothing. It sees anyway . . . and dares to wish an end
44
to outrage."
By acknowledging the silence, the imagination en
compasses the full range of possible experience: in line
i
i with the Pataphysical principle of universal convertabil-
I
I ity, the fixed relationships between words and things,
j things and other things are abandoned. Likewise, ecstacy,
madness or outrage assume the arbitrariness of states of
being that arise out of certain configurations of human
experience. In terms of the literary text, all things
mean equivocally, and the limitations that are assigned
to reality as opposed to dream, space as opposed to time
or self as opposed to other tend to break down thus render-
i
i ing interpretative acts inconsequential since all things
I 45
I are "on par, [and] are equivalent." In its affirmation
j of silence, the postmodern era may be the first to plumb
eternity, for taking his cue from Carlyle who asserted
that speech is of time and silence of eternity, Hassan
sees postmodern literature's refusal to mean as the re
moval of "the temporal reality of the human voice." Lan
guage is seen instead to occupy space and literary forms
! assume their shapes in the perpetual immanence of the
‘ human imagination.
If twentieth century literature provides paradigms
I
j of the disintegration of language systems, Hassan sees the
132
"de-realizations of the world" that they effect as symbolic
creations that explore, by the same token, the aims and
methods by which they come into being through the trans-
cendance of the limits of consciousness. In this regard,
Hassan sees the impact of Kafka's vision on the postmodern
' awareness in that the latter "plays at the luminous drama
j
j of human consciousness" evoking "a new consciousness in
] the reader to replace the consciousness it has destroyed
j
j so that the true quest may be seen at last: a quest for
J questlessness."^
I
! The silence or muteness of the postmodern sensi-
| bility is its reluctance therefore to coalesce into any-
! thing definitive: it is consciousness "eternally poised
4 7
on the eve of Creation" and best exemplified by Beckett
who is referred to by Hassan as the "artist of the impos-
j
j sible." The obligation of such an artist is to "keep try-
i
' ing the impossible," to "start at the impossible, at an
^ impasse." There is, in Cioran's view, a certain gallantry
, to this testing of limitations:
. . . what is admirable is that he (Beckett)
! has stood fast. Having arrived at the outset
up against a wall, he perseveres as gallantly
as he always has: extremity as a point of de
parture, the end as advent! Hence;the feeling
that this world of his, this transfixed, dying
* world, could go on indefinitely, even if ours
J were to disappear.48
As what Cioran terms "a true writer," Beckett is
! thus the destroyer who adds rather than subtracts from
I 133
existence, and who is seen as enriching existence even as
49
he undermines it. In view of Beckett's activity,
Hassan's notion of silence is seen as a negation of the
I
i sacrosanctity of art although the activity that goes into
I
the production of art assumes the focus of attention for
1 the postmodern thinker. Art as the end product, according
i
| to Hassan, must be made to rejoin "brute matter or pure
I 50
i ratio," and like the Absurdist creator, the disciple of
silence must repudiate Art and find his/her apotheosis in
the ironic glance that he/she casts upon his/her creation.
The denial of Art amounts finally to the denial
of valuation for Hassan. Arising from the Existential
rejection of "all essences, all a prioris in the human
condition," the affirmation of silence accepts, conse-
j quently, "transvaluation of values despite itself.
! The abolition of values, in turn, has permitted the
I
j Wittgensteinian aim of making literary creation pass from
being "a piece of disguised nonsense to something that is
| patent nonsense" possible. For if systematized language
J "falls prey to number," as Bergson puts it, in that its
j repetitions, inversions and reciprocations allow for odd
52
I configurations that amount to the joke, language that
!
! is emptied of its historically determined meanings and
i
j regulations ("silenced" words) employed as in dreams in
odd configurations can allow for a restoration "of words
! 134
to their full significance." Furthermore, it is only
through such an employment of language can the transcend
ence of the antimonies of sense and nonsense, silence and
53
speech be realized. By accepting the validity of non-
i
l
; sense, Hassan acknowledges the fact that if words do not
I
necessarily mean, they are imbued nevertheless with the
! power to suggest this ability. For as much as language is
j able to enclose reality, thus rendering reality immobile,
it possesses a certain fluidity that allows it to continu
ally elude ready made restrictions and to perform permu-
tative operations that incidentally discover what Hassan
I terms "cunning equivocations."
j Redemption for humans who have fallen into lan
guage lies, therefore, in "puns and metaphor, holy derange
ment and the resexualization of speech, babble or
I 54
; silence." In the light of this, Hassan finds a certain
! integrity in the activities of the OULIPO whose clownish
| experimentations with language are aimed at the discovery
I of new structures of discourse. According to Raymond
; Queneau, one of the founders of Ouvroir de Litterature
Potentialle, the potentiality of literature is its quest
for forms, its literariness being in its potential to sug-
l 55
j gest infinite numbers Of meanings. For the Oulipeans,
according to Hassan, the exit from verbal constructs lies,
strangely enough, in the creation of new labyrinths of
135
the mind, and to this end, the Oulipeans engage both in
the analysis (that is, the working and reworking) of past
texts while creating new structures and configurations
that tend to test the resiliancy of words and numbers. A
! "Holonime a repetiiton" for example sees lexical play
' based on the three phonemes in the word OULIPO:
!
I
| Oulipo
; Hou! lippe eaul
; Ou Lipp? Haut
Houx lit: "peau,"
Houle Lippo!
Ou lit, pot?56
Again, in the manner of Raymond Roussel whose shade is said
57
to smile xn a Mona Lisa like fashion on the Oulipeans,
i synthoulipism includes lines such as the conversion of
; "Gall, amant de la Reine alia— c'est etonnant" to "Galament
I
j de 11arene a la place Dauphine."
| Underlying this penchant for verbal manipulation,
I
! however, is the awareness that "is fascinated by the clown-
j
ish and gratuitous underside of formal constraints and
linguistic habits." Additionally, there is an alertness
j to the zero degree of words in and of themselves that al-
i lows for their potential extensions into silent space. It
I is this potential that permits the operations on the part
' of words in terms of the Pataphysical principle of ex-
| change. According to this principle, words and their
fixed valencies to meanings are seen to give way, as they
136
do in the "Holonime a repetition," to multiple possibili
ties through the juggling of lexical and phonetic elements.
In a strict sense, these synoulipisms cannot be
categorized as either sense or nonsense. Total nonsense,
I according to Elizabeth Sewell, concentrates on "the divis-
! ibility of its material into ones, units from which a uni-
i verse can be built." This universe, however, cannot, as
; Sewell indicates, be "more than the sum of its parts and
must never fuse into some all-embracing whole which cannot
5 8
be broken down again into the original ones." In the
experiments of the Oulipeans, an area between pure sense
j and nonsense is suggested that Hassan sees as the "realm
j of potentiality" lying, as he says," between the ultimate
, and still unknown limits of freedom and the constraints
| of our languages." It is as if at "the center of language
j
I a black hole required consciousness to define itself by
that widening motion" of language constantly in pursuit
59
of its own recreations. In terms of the experiments of 1
the Oulipeans, their created universes are always more
than the sum of the constitutive parts although, at once,
held momentarily in a fused "all-embracing whole" that can
be made to signify and to disintegrate into "original
ones."
It is the fact that sense and nonsense engage in
larger and larger circlings of eternal returns that
137
engages the attention of the postmodern thinker like Hassan.
For him, "the overweening project of the postmodern mind"
thus becomes the search for the generalization of language
and art "till the human environment itself becomes an im-
■ 6 0
'mense signifier, till dumb matter begins to speak."
! Language for the postmodernist is seen as a system
|
jwhose self-engagements are seen to possess the capacity to
yield significations that may or may not constitute that
which is termed "reality." The postmodern disruption of
the humanistic separation of the real and the imagined,
however, is in the postmodern insistence that all systems
jsuch as mathematics, cybernetics, language, electronics
61
land so forth, can, as analogues of consciousness, in fact
j
jcreate (or destroy) material reality. Reality is said to
respond mysteriously to man's mental forms, as his mind is
the place where contradictions are resolved and, co-
extensively, the external world becomes its objective cor
relative .
The postmodern consciousness is thus one that is
situated in "the vanishing present" where it surveys the
|life humans have imagined for themselves. But if it is
jonly the created objects and systems that hint as to past
i
'existences, then, as Hassan seems to suggest, the whole
i
jhumanistic enterprise has been a waste of time, for in the
i
;twentieth century, objects are being "replaced in both
j __________________________________________________________________138
technology and the arts by process or systems, by paradigm
6 2
of innovation and change upon the human imagination."
Among the objects that will disappear in the wake of other
created objects is man himself. For having constituted
1 man as an object among other designated objects in the
' universe, the humanistic tradition necessitated also the
i
i separation of humans and their visions from material real-
j ity. The postmodern vision attempts the return of humans
!
to their world by realizing the convergence of isolated
categories— man, woman, art, science, reality, dream— to
the point where humans will be able to pass "through expe-
j rience via the unmediated vision. Nature, the body and
! 6 3
: human consciousness— that xs the only text."
j In effect, the postmodern consciousness aspires
j
| to the convergence that the creative imagination has al-
i
i
1 ways realized: poets and writers, accordxng to Anais Nxn,
t
f
| have succeeded in bridging reality and dream through the
i
| pursuit of images of consciousness that structures of logxc
I 64
i tend to "break or erase." The postmodern conscxousness
t
i can, in fact, be termed mythopoetic in that the designa-
!
; tion of consciousness is symbolic rather than intellectual,
j Its "realization of the passage ways," as Anais Nin puts
! it, comes through the ability of the imagination to remain
I
"open and fluid" in the face of its own shaping processes.
j The postmodern imagination is aware of its own vitality and
i
I 139
it strives to in-volve itself in its own self-creations,
hence analysis and logical strategies fail in that "to
analyze is to dissect to dissect means to work on dead
[ matter.
!
t
1 The realization of the mind's activity is always,
! finally, the awareness of present moment: reality in
i
terms of the new humutantnism is not in depicted reality
but the reality of present experience, the will to involve
the self in it. Anti-art and anti-language in this regard
are thus far from being anti-human in that they point al
ways to the reality of the imagination at work in the man
ipulations it effects in the text without striving to
point to the play of shadows on the walls of the cave.
I
| If the only evidence of life is in its moving and present
i i
j beingness, the postmodern sensibility's denial of logical
!
| structures is its denial of the stillness, the acquies-
j cence that formal impositions bring to bear upon phenomena.
' Such a vision is undoubtedly Promethean in its
proportions for it aspires, fundamentally, to in-volve
I
| consciousness to the point where consciousness becomes
I "co-extensive with the universe but the universe rests in
i
J equilibrium and consistency in the form of thought, on a
j
I supreme pole of interiorization." It is toward this pole
!
| that Teilhard de Chardin terms the "omega point" that the
; postmodern imagination addresses itself for it is the
140
point which represents "the principle that at one and the
same time makes this involution irreversible and moves and
6 6
gathers it in." For Hassan, the omega point is the in
finite consciousness, the point of return of the Word to
j
I 6 7
j the Spirit from which it came. It is, furthermore, the
; point at which all contradictions are drawn to a perora-
t
tion and psychologically, according to Nin, a state that
rationalists can only term madness. The insanity of post
modernism is its doubt as to the ability of forms, struc
tures to bring about the conciliation of phenomena, its
i mission is the escape from structure via the creation of
| structure. To a large extent, its vision is more optimis-
. tic than Sartrian Existentialism that posts the no-exit
f
i sign or sees humans "situated" in language, unable to re
main silent yet becoming responsible for their utterances
i
I once they cast themselves headlong into this "foreign
. „ 6 8
i order.
j The postmodern insanity is Hassan's image of the
I
modern Orpheus who, dismembered, continues to sing to the
| accompaniment of the lyre without strings. It is the in
sanity that realizes that it is part of no body, that is,
| of history, literature, or art. At the same time, the
! dismembered parts of the modern Orpheus belong to all
} bodies, and the dismemberment that continually goes on as
! creation creates creations insures the return to infinite
i
! 141
consciousness. In the new humutantnism, things fall to
gether; humans, conscious of their capacity to engage in
the dual acts of creation and destruction, can, in Hassan's
vision, effect the diapason of phenomena.
i
! This essentially optimistic vision is finally, as
' Hassan says, based on desire that springs from the despair,
!
; the "emptiness and silence" that constitutes the void that
; is being. Where Sartre sees the "duplicity of words and
i
the muteness of life" that make up the notion of the
69
Absurd and constantly seeks the "retrieval of words in
j
j their constant danger of being claimed by the void,"
i
j Hassan arrives at the void via the Existential route and
I
| is propelled across it by the desire to live and not merely
* 7 0
| to tell. For in the playground of the void, Hassan sees
| space for the creation of reality and the living of it;
i
"everyone then," he states, "his own magician, and every
i
: . . , „71
j man a magician alone.
i Postmodern literature has been the means of locat-
!
! ing the void around which humans build their systems; more
t
importantly, for Hassan, literature is also the means by
which speculations as to the destiny of humans may be
arrived upon in that literary creations are co-existential
I
, with all other systems and apprehending their transitions
I
| allows for the choice of either living "under" or "over"
I
| them. For the postmodern critic, the choice can be that
142
of living "over" critical systems. As such, the critico/
literary task is one of invention, one that engages the
shaping of new metaphors of consciousness in the wake of
ever dying forms.
THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME: This is the preoccu-
j pation of the postmodern "creatic" who sees his/her envi-
!
j ronment finally not as a static stage set but as "the con-
I
tinually transforming sum of all our external experiences
. . . omni-dynamic [and above] all else of universe but
72
self." As part of this fluid environment, literature
now confronts all historical assumptions as to what it is
and how it is that humans must reconcile themselves with
it, for as creation, .caught in the act of self-creation,
f
I "criticism is helpless, unless acknowledging its helpless-
I
j ness, it can invent its own vantage and rules even as
73
postmodern literature invents itself."
L
143
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER 4
^"Leslie Fiedler, "The New Mutants," Partisan
Review (Fall, 1965), p. 505.
2Ibid., p. 509.
3
Ihab Hassan, "Beyond a Theory of Literature:
Intimations of Apocalypse?" Comparative Literature
Studies, 1,-4 (1964).
^Ibid., p. 262.
5
Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays on
the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1971) .
^Hassan, "Beyond a Theory of Literature," p. 26 2.
7
Bertrand de Jouvenal, "On the Nature of the
Future," in The Futurists, ed. by Alvin Toffler (New York:
Random House, 1972), p. 278.
g
Hassan, "Beyond a Theory of Literature," p. 263.
9
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge,
trans. by A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Harper Books,
1972), p. 82.
10Ibid., p. 62.
"^Hassan, "Beyond a Theory of Literature," pp. 262,
263, passim.
12Ibid.
1 ?
Northrop Frye, The Well Tempered Critic (Indiana:
Indiana University Press, 1963), p. 123. "The first step
. . . is to realize that just as a poem implies a distinc
tion between the poet as man and the poet as verbal crafts
man, so the response to a poem implies a corresponding
distinction in the critic."
144
14
de Jouvenal, "On the Nature of the Future,"
p. 278 .
15
Dick Higgins, from a lecture given at the Con
ference on Postmodernism, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, 1976.
i
! 16
1 Ernst Cassirer, The Logic of the Humanities,
; trans. by Clarence Smith Howe (Connecticut: Yale Univer-
' sity Press, 1974), p. 213.
17
Morse Peckham, Man1s Rage for Chaos (New York:
'Philosophical Library, 1965), p. 314.
18
Hayden White, "The Culture of Criticism," in
Liberations, ed. by Ihab Hassan (Connecticut: Wesleyan
!University Press, 1971), p. 56.
! 19
{ Ibid., p. 54.
20
Ihab Hassan, The Literature of Silence (New York
Alfred Knopf, Inc., 1967), pp. 3, 5, 6 passim.
21
Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence (Princeton, New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 19 7 3), p. 20.
22
Ihab Hassan, The Dismemberment of Orpheus (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 17.
23
Norman 0. Brown, Life Against Death (Connecticut
Wesleyan University Press, 1967), p. 10.
24
Richard Poirier, "Rock of Ages," in Liberations,
ed. by Ihab Hassan (Connecticut: Wesleyan University
Press, 1971), p. 56.
25
Ihab Hassan, Dismemberment, p. ix.
2 6
Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Modern Theme (London:
C. W. Daniels, 1931), p. 86.
27
Hayden White, "The Culture of Criticism," p. 59.
28
Ihab Hassan, The Literature of Silence, pp. 6, 7
29
Buckminster Fuller, "Man’s Changing Role m the
Universe," in Liberations, ed. by Ihab Hassan (Connecticut
Wesleyan University Press, 1971), p. 197.
30
. Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. 325.
! 145
! 31
Buckminster Fuller, "Man's Changing Role in the
! Universe," p. 212.
!
22 J. Hillis Miller, "The Geneva School," Critical
Quarterly, Vol. 8 (Winter, 1966), p. 315 f.
1 3 3
! Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. 2 35.
34
Ihab Hassan, Dismemberment, pp. 38, 201.
35
' Jean Paulhan, Les fleurs de Tarbes (Paris:
Gallimard, 1941), p. 72.
36
Maurice Blanchot, Le livre a venir (Paris:
Gallimard, 1959), pp. 237-265.
37
Maurice Blanchot, Un coup de Des, quoted in
1 Blindness and Insight by Paul de Man, p. 72.
3 8
Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (New York
! Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 73.
1 3 9
Leslie Fiedler, "New Mutants," p. 214.
i 40
, Ihab Hassan, Dismemberment, pp. 247-249.
4^Ibid. , p. 23.
42Ibid., p. 247.
I 4 3
I "The adipose tissue of women is odious because
; it has a function— it produces milk." Jarry.
! 44
Ihab Hassan, Literature of Silence, p. 24.
' 45
1 Roger Shattuck, The Banquet Years (New York:
■ Doubleday Anchor Books, 1961), p. 241.
46
Ihab Hassan, Dismemberment, p. 137.
4^Ihab Hassan, Radical Innocence, p. 326.
4 8
E. M. Cioran, "Encounters with Beckett," Partisan
Review, Vol. 43, No. 2 (1976), p. 284.
I " .. " ' ■ ■ ■ " ■ ..
49
Ibid., p. 280 .
50
Albert Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus (New York:
Vintage Books, 1959), p. 72. "Creating or not creating
changes nothing . . . the absurd creator does nor prize
j his work. He could repudiate it."
; 146 :
51
Ihab Hassan, Dismemberment, p. 14 3.
52
Henri Bergson, "Laughter," in Comedy, ed. by
Wylie Sypher (New York: Doubleday, 1956), p. 144.
5 3
Norman 0. Brown, Love1s Body (New York: Random
I House, 1966), p. 258.
' 54
Ihab Hassan, Dismemberment, p. 16.
I
55
! R. Queneau, OULIPO: La litterature potentielle
! (Paris: Gallimard, 1973).
j 56Ibid., p. 237.
5 7
! Ibid., p. 235.
i
I 5 8
Elizabeth Sewell, The Field of Nonsense (London:
! Chatto and Windus, 1953), p. 53 fn.)
; 59
Ihab Hassan, "Abstractions," in Diacritics
I (Summer, 1975), p. 18.
I
^Ibid. , p. 18 .
f k 1
Ihab Hassan, "Beyond Arcadians and Technophiles:
New Convergences in Culture?" Massachusetts Review (Spring,1
1976), p. 17.
f k 7
Ihab Hassan, Dismemberment, p. 11.
6 3
Geoffrey Hartman, The Unmediated Vision (Connecti
cut: Yale University Press, 1954), p. 155.
64
Anais Nin, The Novel of the Future (New York: .
Collier Books, 1968), p. 7.
65Ibid., p. 12.
^Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (New
York: Harper, 1959), p. 309.
6 7
Ihab Hassan, Dismemberment, p. 217.
^Jean Paul Sartre, Literary and Philosophical
-Essays, ' trans. by Annette Nicholson (London: Rider and
Company, 1955),p . 153.
147
6 9
Ihab Hassan, Dismemberment, pp. 144, 145.
70
Jean Paul Sartre, Nausea, trans. by Lloyd
Alexander (New York: New Directions, 1964), p. 56.
"... a man is always a teller of tales, he lives sur-
l rounded by his stories and the stories of others, he sees
I everything that happens to him through them . . . but yet
! you have to choose: love or tell."
I
71
i Ihab Hassan, Dismemberment, p. 258.
72
Buckminster Fuller, "Man's Changing Role," p. 212.
I
73
! Ihab Hassan, "Abstractions," p. 18.
CHAPTER 5
EXECUTION: AN ALTERNATIVE
! . . . perpetual adolescence which keeps the
future open . . . the pleasure of prese-
| nescence, or of a proleptic consciousness
! for which there is nothing new under the sun
I except the renewal of that thought.
I - Hartman
)
I
j Raymond Olderman has correctly assessed that Ihab
! Hassan!s critical directions have arisen from the reali
zation that there is a discrepancy in the way critics
"talk about literature and the way literature talks about
1 i
! life." Specifically, Hassan's concerns a,re centered upon
| the issue of literary response and the authentic articu-
i
j lation of such a response. Both, in his view, are ulti-
; mately delineated by a culture that postulates literary
! criticism as an activity distinct from other activities
I
2
| of man. Such a view, motivated by the earnest desire to
i
I make literary criticism the means of extending the range
I
|of responses possible to a text has led, paradoxically, to
I the limitation of perspectives regarding a text. Criticism
ias a separate discipline implies responses strictly deline-
j
jated along certain prescribed frames of thought, or certain
categories of responses. And this insistence, that
!
I 149
criticism be regarded as a limited activity, has led, in
Hassan's view, to the paralysis of criticism today.
As an activity that is enclosed by a literary cul
ture, criticism necessarily locks itself into "a certain
I
i
! relation to an author, a text, a particular language or
3
; voice." Held m this relationship, the response to a
j text is not a response per se, but a rationalized reaction
|shaped by antecedent promptings, a "voice" that the critic
!"pretends to hear [since he/she is supposed to hear it]
I 4
j and which he never hears twice." The failures of criti-
i
j cism where response is concerned are thus less the failures
of tact, method or discrimination than those Hassan terms
antecedent failures of wisdom. Such failures, Hassan
jnotes, prevent the critic from recognizing the forces that
are brought to bear upon the critic's reaction to a given
text. Ultimately, this indictment hinges upon what Hassan
1 sees as the reluctance with which criticism deals with the
i
world outside the narrow definitions of its own culture.
Jealously insisting on the objectivity of its activities,
criticism incorporates the sustained exposition and logical
i
idiscourse that marks its separation from the world. The
i
J insistence that it remain an autonomous activity can only
;lead to the diminution of its relevance, for the literary
iculture itself, according to Hassan, constitutes a small
;part of life. Furthermore, he sees it as becoming yet a
150
smaller part of life unless "it can find a , wuy to enter or
5
shape the dreams of man, [the] technics of his future."
Criticism, in other words, must incorporate larger
i
premises, become part of the design for life rather than
; remaining the isolated activity of a small segment of
• people.
| In Hassan's view, narrowly defined responses have
| kept the culture of criticism within isolated boundaries,
i
but, given a freer range, criticism can enter into the
| envisioning of "the new man" and play an important role in
!
6
| fostering change. If such an enterprise is borne in mind,
i
' the critic can only revolt against the narrow definitions
I
jof literary response. He/she cannot function in terms of
i
j the distinctions that dictate reactions and the mani-
i
|festations thereof. Similarly, while rejecting these
(categories of responses, the critic cannot exclude anything
I
7
ifrom his/her attention least of all him/herself. The
jcritic must, in other words, watch the activities of
jhis/her own consciousness as it responds to the literary
jtext. The movement away from the narrow impersonality of
I
jconventional criticism, according to Hassan, is one "that
;explores the subjective life, the silent structure of
i
I language and consciousness and [which also] implicates
!criticism into a wider experience, [namely] the fantasy of
,culture."^
t
I
|
151
j True to the avant-garde principle of constant
renewal and progression, Hassan's view of criticism and
its aims can be seen as involving much more than just
aesthetic questions since it insists on "the fusion or at
i
i least affinity of political and social energies, values
j and aspirations with literary and aesthetic ones." It is
I
1 the sort of expression, in other words, that has been
i
! associated with avant-gardism "ever since it became a
self-conscious and publicly celebrated (or denied)
9
activity." Thus, if avant-garde art can be identxfxed
by its refusal to "reiterate or refine what has already
been created,"10 the radicalism of Hassan’s projected
criticism lies in his refusal to engage in the repetitions
S that constitute the activity of conventional criticism
where every attempt at clarification or interpretation
amounts to a repetition in terms of antecedent constraints,
formulated "responses," or levels of vraisemblance that
either spell out (or attempt to at any rate) the limi
tations. In Hassan’s view, the articulation in terms of
given constraints can only amount to the unnecessary
refinement of refined perspectives. Consequently, he dis
avows the status of critic and scholar, well aware of the
i
i restrictions that are implicitly suggested in either
I "scholarly" or "critical" postures. But while aware of the
!
i relative freedom of the creative aspects of the imagination,
152
Hassan is quick to admit that his "creaticism" is not an
attempt at impersonating the poet, novelist or playwright.
His efforts are directed instead at finding his own voice
"in the singular forms that speculation sometimes
requires,"11 Every voice, however, has its resonances or
i
! is "cursed by its echo, blessed by an answer this side of
mortality," In the interchange between reader and text, a
i
full range of these voices thus ask to be heeded, the widest
possible range of responses must be given their full play.
With this in mind, Hassan's "creaticism" moves in a
direction that proposes such a play: not only should there
be a dialectic, he suggests, but perhaps even a trialectic
or multilectic, Within his own temperament, Hassan adds,
at least "three persons quarrel: an Existentialist, a
12
jUtopian and an Orphist." In this respect, the critic
|him/herself can no longer be regarded as an objective
;observer of the text. He/she is perhaps the locus of
interchange where the critic's "own," and perhaps "objec
tive" voice cannot be discriminated from the general
clamour. The attempt, therefore, to posit an authoratative
I
|voice or a distinct aesthetic response is effected only "at
I 13
ithe risk of deadly discrimination."
1 Language itself, as Kristeva has indicated is
,essentially "multi-vocal" and engagement of contrapuntal
i
iaspects which constitutes a "dialogue." Taking her cue
153
from Bakhtin who observed that "le dialogue est la seule
sphere possible de la vie du language," Kristeva adds that
today we are able to rediscover the fact that "les rapports
dialogiques a plusiers niveux du langage: dans la dyade
i
1 combinatoire langue/parole; dans les systemes de langage
14
' . . . et de parole." At another level, Kristeva states
; also that the "caractere double du langage" manifests
itself in the syntagmatic axes of language which work in
terms of "voices" in a dialogue, that is, by countering
each other in the creation of meaning or sense.
It is the pretense at assuming a unified perspec
tive voiced in an authoratative mono-tone that prompted a
critic like Bataille to pronounce criticism "a defeat and
I 15
1 a fraud" the "tache de sang intellectuel" prompted by "la
j rage de rendre raison.It is this authoratative mono-
| tone, the voice that strives to tell, which Hassan aims at
I
\ abandoning. What Hassan creates instead is the place of
j interchange and he accomplishes this through the manipu-
i
jlation of the formal aspects of the page. By doing so, the
[ attention is thus directed to the "what happens" part of
literary response rather than to the "what can be said
jabout it" aspect.
In "Joyce-Beckett: A Scenario in 8 Scenes and A
jVoice," the response to the works of Joyce and Beckett is
i
; manifest in terms of a lecturer who speaks at various
i
i
i 154
locales. Each locale is specifically designated— the Olin
library, Wesleyan University, "Scene IV, The Gresham,"
etc. In this drama of response, there is, in addition to
"the lecturer," a voice that constantly interjects its
I remarks. This voice provides a contrapuntal thread to the
! commentary of "the lecturer" and its presence is suggested
I by different typography. Typographical differences also
i
| suggest tonal variations which distinguish the formal,
rhetorical and evidently academic stance of "the speaker,"
for we hear that:
The comedy of Beckett is more savage. His clowns
rend the epistomological fabric of our existence;
his plots turn Descartes into a master jester.
Parody is the truth in doubt. The reductive com
edy of numbers, the hilarity of machines, the
sadism in the joke— these inspire Beckett.17
In contrast, "the voice," whose sotto voce rises
insistently as the lecturer continues, represents the
iimpulsive, perhaps more spontaneous response that always
leaps, perhaps a little too easily, to quibble, to supple
ment and even to yawn ("the tyranny of art indeed! The
point has not been made, no no, five minutes into the
18
ispeech, and the main point has not been made") in the
|
!face of the rational reactions to a text.
A third presence which manifests itself in this
j drama of literary response is unnamed. It is the organ-
iizing presence whose function it is to comment on the moves
155
of "the voice" and "the lecturer." It is this third
presence that unifies the responses to Beckett and, while
it is an important part of the total literary response, it
is not, as conventional criticism would have us believe,
i
i the only part of the critical act.
! Several "voices" are thus involved in the literary
! response and no one voice can rightly be claimed as one's
own. Nor can any one voice be fairly designated the
authority of projecting the spectrum of responses to a
literary text. Through the party of memory, Hassan demon
strates that the voices of others are continually inte
grated with those of the critic, or at least to those of
his/her voices that can be identified readily with as his/
i her "own." In the "1972" chapter of Paracriticisms, the
I
j voices of the reviewers of Hassan's book The Dismemberment
|
iof Orpheus; Toward A Postmodern Literature are written
into a piece that is aimed at demonstrating the endless
chain of reactions and counter-reactions to a book. Actual
reviews by critics are included, and the "voices" of David
Daiches, W. M. Frohock, and Harold Rosenberg are placed
I
: alongside the remarks of "The Reviewer," "The Literary
jCynic" and "The Professor," Again, typographical differ-
j
| ences indicate the various voices that by turns praise,
[question or condemn Hassan's critical labours. The attempt
: at summarizing the continuous reactions, reviews and
i
156
counter criticisms is made by "The Professor" whose
pontificatorial attempts at resolving issues are continu
ally countered by "The Cynic." It is "The Literary Cynic"
who finally raises the question as to the feasibility of
jHassan's projections of Paracriticism as an alternative
! to conventional criticism which countenances only "right"
j or "wrong" reactions to a text,
i
The incorporation of several perspectives on
Hassan"s part is the acknowledgement of the multi-faceted
aspect of the Postmodern personality/personalities. With
this view in mind, no objective perspective, and certainly
no one right (or wrong) reaction is possible, since the
i detached perspective implies a monolithic subject’s en-
j counter with a similarly monolithic object. In each
| confrontation with a text, literally too much of the critic
I
; is involved with the work for him/her to remain disinter
ested. Such an awareness is a Postmodern one: it
recognizes the intimate interactions between the self(s)
and the world(s), hence negating the traditional need for
j objectivity or fairness of judgement. In this regard,
iWilde's declaration that one is only objective about things
I which are of little interest to us takes on a new light.
I
1 The traditionally disinterested view is thus the view of
i the critic who is literally un-in-volved and in the light
i
;of postmodernism, his/her criticism is "absolutely
I
157
valueless [since] the man who sees both sides of a
19
question is a man who sees absolutely nothing at all."
If the postmodern questions are those which ask, "Which
world is this? What is to be done in it?" all sides to
[
I the question are to be raised, and so intimate an involve-
jment with the text necessitates that which conventional
j criticism may deem personal or subjective. It thus be-
i
| comes "one's business in such matters to have preferences,"
to allow for all voices including those which one suspects
as being more subjective than others. By having prefer
ences, the critic ceases to be "fair" and discards the
primary assumption in the hermeneutic tradition concerning
the organic unity of text, and consequently, the "commit-
j ment to univocation [as] was elaborated by Protestantism
20
to set up the one true meaning of Scripture."
i
j Being objective in traditional criticism is always
linked to being rational. But as we have seen in Hassan's
drama of response, the rational aspect of response, that
is the organizing, unifying principle of response, accounts
I for only a part of a total reaction to a text, one mood
I
I among many that arises in the critical activity. Thus, the
assertion of this one mood amounts to a closure: "there
|are two ways," Wilde contended, of disliking art, "one is
jto dislike it. The other is to like it rationally," that
|
|is, to insist on confining it within the narrowest
i
!
i
158
interpretative range as possible. But art and literature
always create what Wilde saw as "a divine madness" in both
artist and beholder. The tendency of literature, as it is
with art, is toward the extension of vistas and this
I
i tendency ultimately runs counter to the constraints of
j reason. Postmodernism's demotion of reason comes through
j
I the acceptance of this divine madness. Consequently, it
i
1 recognizes even the voices that speak from "the outer
limits."
The recognition of all voices leads to the creation
of hitherto unknown aspects of response. The postmodern
critic's task is the honest rendition of the interaction
and creation of these perspectives; his/her discourse, as
1 a result, must extend beyond the limitations of sustained
j exposition and logical discourse. Hassan has demonstrated
I
I the interaction of voices in terms of drama and parody.
I
i In other creative/critical efforts, the mechanics of
i
21
response are rendered in terms of film and sound. By
j articulating the literary response in cinematic terms,
I
| Hassan demonstrates the imagination's grasp of life through
j the interaction of referential frames. Each "frame" is
t
j announced before its contents are divulged and the slippage
i
' between frames that allows for glimpses of knowledge that
I
| might otherwise remain hidden is also articulated, Hassan
! thus manipulates form and content to the extent that
I
I
I 159
discourse no longer simply "tells" but "shows" as well.
As in his dramas of response, the workings of the imagi
nation, demonstrated in terms of "frames," "slippage," and
"montages" are again rendered in different typography,
j The structures of awareness in their successive
I interplays and disintegrations are thus talked about and
| demonstrated in terms of a referential basis outside of
i
the literary limits. In this, regard, Hassan is true to the
notion that good criticism necessarily moves on, that no
critic need be limited "to the subjective form of expres
sion. The method of drama is his, as well as the method
22
of epos. He may use dialogue . . . or adapt narration."
To be sure, literary criticism has included studies of
i literature in relation to art or film, but such studies
I
i
jhave traditionally been on the level of content and not to
I
| the extent where the actual mechanics of film, the plastic
arts or music are incorporated into the rendition of
literary response. For Hassan, the convergences in the
i
| postmodern world— of literary genres, of art, literature
i
i and technology, make it imperative that these "voices" be
23
heeded since they, too, ultimately contribute toward the
orientation of critical responses,
i
: While giving ground to the range of voices that
i
j are activated in the literary response constitutes an
i
!honest presentation of what occurs in the encounter with
i
I
i 160
the text, other alternatives to the "bad faith" of
conventional critical approaches include silence and/or
prophecy. In the postmodern recognition of all voices, the
obverse silence ultimately suggests itself: if everything
or anything can be said about a text, then perhaps nothing
also need be said about anything. Notwithstanding the
j monotone of conventional criticism, literal silence can,
1 as Bataille recognized, give rise to a certain anguish.
Hence "la conscience qu’il devrait se taire 1'engage a
4 .- • ,,24
vaticmer.
In the paracriticism which Hassan advocates, a
j
I metaphoric silence, at least, is possible. For para-
i
|criticism, which is "not a form strictly imposed but the
I tentativeness between one form and another," aims not for
j "the recovery of text and letters but for the metaphors
i
25
thereof," Where conventional criticism "tells" and
'hence means, paracriticism is interested primarily in the
means of production of meaning. By meaning, conventional
|criticism violates silence even as it terminates possi
bilities, puts a halt to newer productions of sens, Thus,
I
j for as much as paracriticism recognizes and pits voices
|against each other, their multiple presences negate each
!others1 meanings even as they create "new and unknown
!spaces" that tend to realize that which cannot be realized
i
2 6
iunder normal linguistic configurations. It is in the
i
161
extension of critical domains that a critic like Hassan
essentially fulfills a prophetic function, for the prophet
is one who envisions that which is as yet unknown or
present. In Hassan's view, changes in the way we talk
about literature begin with the envisioning of alternative
'possibilities, Unlike the positions which aim at estab
lishing a following or a measure of control, the vatic
|critic, however, recognizes his/her predictions only as
|attempts at widening the spheres of imaginative possibili-
27 . . .
ties. While posing possibilities, a critic like Hassan
cannot posit limitations, for he knows that any deline
ations one insists upon are, ultimately, a miniscule
!apportionment of total possibilities. Honest criticism,
as Wilde noted, cannot concede to final positions. It
;refuses to "bind itself to shallow shiboleths of any sect
lor school, [it] loves truth for its own sake and loves it
! 2 8
!not less because it knows it to be unattainable."
| As "truth" recedes beyond the critical grasp, the
visionary critic strives continually to correspond, in
his/her expression of the literary response, to the ex
panding edges of imaginative constructs. With regard to
the rapid changes in twentieth century art and technology,
:the vatic aspect of Hassan's paracriticism lies in the
articulation of the critic's need to "make the imagination
29
icapable of new actions [in order to] meet new experience."
Stretching the imaginative capacity, however, hinges upon
a certain willingness to innovate, to invent and to create.
But traditional criticism has always emphasized the
separation of the intellectual and the creative in its
! expression of literary response. Hassan1s paracriticism
i attempts the search for a terrain where both the critical
| and imaginative are able to cohabitate comfortably. The
i
| view that criticism itself can be an art represents the
I first step toward bridging the schism between intellectual
i versus creative enterprises. According to Wilde:
I
t Criticism is itself an art . . . why should it
j not be? It works with materials, and puts them
i into a form that is at once new and delightful.
I What more can one say of poetry? Indeed . , .
| criticism is a creation within a creation.30
I
i For as much as criticism can be regarded as art,
I it possesses an independence that art does not have, for
I
I
i art, according to Wilde, depends upon the critical faculty
I
|for its uniqueness, "It is to the critical faculty that we
; 31
I owe each new mould that art finds ready to its hand."
!
I
'The creative impulse alone is insufficient to creation of
I
! art, but in terms of traditional criticism, its presence
;allows for what Hassan sees as the means by which "impro-
ivisation on the possible" can be effected.
Innovation, the opening up of new imaginative
■ spaces, becomes particularly crucial in postmodern criti
cism in the face of the realization that the "intellectual"
163
rendition of literary response can no longer conceal the
inability of logical discourse to effectively render the
convergences of voices that takes place in the moment of
i
j reading. Logical discourse, furthermore, is unable to
i
| render the place or locus of such convergences although xt
| is able to simulate certain facets of this encounter within
j the limitations it designates. The tedious processes that
! go into a finished work of criticism reveal, furthermore,
the "distances" that finally exist between literary
|response, its moments and the re-presentation of these
!
i
(responses. Hassan notes, for instance that:
j I too, have my habits and ritual performances. I
I write a book in long hand, I revise it with eraser
j and pen. My wife types it, and I proofread the
! typescript with a pen. My copy editor, at the
! publishing house, goes over the manuscript with a
I color pencil, and returns certain pages with
! queries. I then wait for the galleys, which X
' correct. Later the page proofs arrive and I cor
rect these too. I then receive unbound copies of
the book; these go to advance readers and a few
| friends. Finally a year later, or perhaps two:
! "the finished product," Are these the uses of real
I or lived time? My habits serve a dead m an.32
|
I The culture of criticism, as Hassan is well aware
'of, thus tends to reward the habits and repetitions that
I
!take the critic beyond the range of responses to the text
I
:to the extent that critics "all spend part of [their]
■ 33
jday[s] in a dead letter office." By employing logxcal
discourse, which aims primarily at sustained expositions
of the text, criticism involves itself in a ruse: it can
164
only talk in sum as to the literary response, and when it
does so, it talks from narrowed down perspectives which
tend to exclude the real or lived time of response,
1 Every great literary text, however, possesses the
i
i capacity to extend whatever imaginative spaces are possible
; in the reading experience. For as much as language creates
i
| the text, and the potential for expansion of imaginative
; spaces, only the "un-languaging" of it provides for the
'multiplication of these imaginative spaces. For as long as
the language of criticism adheres to functional ends,
imaginative spaces emerging from the engagement of reader
and text become either "repetitions of the work in a finer,
paler mode," or like "genre-conceptions," become keyed
! specifically toward giving the reader of criticism only
I
jthat which he/she already knows and expects. In both cases,
■ at any rate, there is the danger "of the prey being
t
! relinquished for the shadow— -of the work being exchanged
. 3 4
for its anatomy,
I Language, the means of obtaining absolutes, must
!always be "anatomical" in the sense that it aims at
effecting reductions of the world to the point of essential-
(
jness. Functional language in literary criticism works in a
!similar fashion: it reduces the "event" that constitutes
l
;the literary response by not being able to render the arena
!of action that makes up the reading enterprise. What it
does provide is its own space, its own presence as a
substitute for the space it cannot represent. Logical
discourse, furthermore, effects an obliteration of the
time during which the reader engages in the text. Bound
!
I by the aims of absolutism, language becomes also a "sign
35
i of our tragic time-bound fate." Specifically, the time
! language forces upon us is one that either conveys the
I
| idea of time or occurs in time. But there is, as Hassan
] indicates, a critical time in the sense that, as a
"listener" of the voices arising from the literary engage
ment, the critic spends a special time which language
cannot depict but which is, nevertheless, an integral part
of the reading process. In this regard, what language
; becomes is the "mere representation of our quest (my empha-
i
; sis) for the impossible rather than a real existential
' 36
i possession of the absolute,"
I
I
| In the reading enterprise, every exchange of
j voices engages a world of simultaneity or points of con-
j
: vergences where cause and effect coincide. Here too,
i
{ eternity and instance are said to merge and "sequence be
comes synchrony." Response is, correctly, "the Perpetual
1 37
Now, as in mystic times." It is mysterious in the truest
i
| sense of the word in that it cannot be talked about, that
I
|is, rendered in linguistic terms, since the play of
i
(language opens only onto the sequential ordering of events.
166
j But the sequential ordering of things or events is always
linear and tends to span time rather than enclosing it or
concentrating it, and critical time, as Hassan has articu
lated, is always concentrated presence. If there is a
mysteriousness to literary response, it is thus the
"seizing" rather than the spanning of time, the partici
pation in "the enormity" as Hartmann puts it of "present
experience" which is the prerogative of the gods. In this
respect, language always dissolves presenescence, divides
human consciousness and hence prevents the state of "god-
j likeness.” Taken a step further, writing as a represen-
i
! tation of response becomes "a laughable substitute for the
i
| sacred trance . . , an image of the roaring revel-— a
^ 38
i symbolic sacrifice [since] true life is elsewhere,"
| Every literary text, as Paul de Man points out,
possesses no ontology. It is the ontology that Hassan
39
| calls into doubt also since he too knows that the text
j can only "solicit" an "understanding that has to remain
| immanent because it poses the problem of its intelligi-
! bility in its own terms," It is this immanence, de Man
| adds, which "is necessarily a part of all critical
40
discourse." But if criticism "is a metaphor for reading"
las de Man asserts, traditional criticism's chief neglect
i
I
jmust rest on its failure to clarify the mechanics of
"immanent understanding" that is solicited by the text
167
before imposing a metaphor (i.e., intellectual discourse)
for the interaction between reader and text. Thus, if one
of the constitutive aspects of response is "presenescence"
or the resolution of instance and eternity, conventional
j
i language as a metaphor for reading tends to give rise to
1 the dislocation of presence that introduces the Derridian
notion of "difference or delay." In the classical sense,
j metaphor allows for the seeing of similarities in dis-
i
j similarities. It enables the substitution of one signified
i
! for another to the extent that the one signifier becomes
. . 41
the sxgnifxer of the other. But whxle dxstxnctxve
characteristics of one signifier become blurred in the
i integration with the characteristics of another signifier,
jmetaphors do not effect the total obliteration of certain
I
1 characteristics in the way that criticism as "a metaphor
i
! for reading" with its use of intellectual discourse, tends
i
ito bring about with regard to the "seizing of time" that is
inherent to the reading process. For, in logical discourse,
;"through infinite circulation from sign to sign and from
i
E
:representation to representation, the self sameness
i
42
(P£2£re) of presence has no longer a place."
j In terms of Hassan's emphasis on the mind and its
japprehension of reality (and/or the text) im-mediately,
I
i.e., without the mediation of systems of signification, the '
,re-presentative mediacy of conventional language can only
be regarded as the negation of self/selves, of the text
and of the sense of presence in the reading engagement.
Derrida, for instance, states that:
the mute sign is a sign of liberty when it expresses
within immediacy; then, what it expresses and he who
: expresses himself through it are properly present.
; There is neither detour nor anonymity.43
I
| The linguistic sign, however, never remains mute
^ for as much as it says or tells, or is a constitutive part
j of any system of reason. Every act of reason, corre
spondingly, amounts to the use of the linguistic sign in
terms of laws. The accedence to these laws, "by dint of
cowardice" as Cioran puts it, amounts, in turn, to a
|"sliding toward absence, towards springs that do not deign
| 44
I to flow." In the Nietzschean tradition that does not
i I
Acknowledge the imposition of the writing condition (or for|
i that matter, the human condition in terms of arbitrary
constraints) Bataille, foremost of the so called
j"Terrorists," refuses to acknowledge all regulations of the
literary game. He chooses instead to elevate the erotic
j and the terrifying, namely the sensations which neither
|logic nor language can encompass, in order to indicate the
iinadequacies of both. Similarly, Cioran affirms that the
»
lend has come for "the dynasty of intelligibility," adding
;that "what can be communicated is not worth lingering over"
!
|and that perhaps only "mystery" finally can arrest the
!
I
j 169
I 45 . . . .
attention. Hassan's view, in line with the Nietzschean
tradition, thus "implies a radical perversion and a
precipitous break with common sense." As with Bataille,
j there is the indication that criticism must choose between
i 46
I the deadly game of insanity or futility.
' With Bataille and Cioran, the search for the self/
j selves begins with the subversion of conventional language
I use. In this regard, even wisdom or the application of the
reasonable is of little value. According to Cioran, "the
ifact remains that in the Satanic adventure we have acquired
i
| 47
J the mastery we shall never possess in wisdom." In post
modern terms, the Satanic adventure upon which criticism
attempts to embark encompasses the realization that
i
|"inescapably, language embodies and manifests man’s limits,
;while the transgression of limits which from Sade to Artaud
!has been the impossible dream of modern poets, remains
48 .
;beyond the grasp of words." It is with this realization
!that Hassan effects his transgression in the sense that he,
I
|like Bataille, strives at being "l'ecrivain [qui est] mdme
lie plus oppose au discours a l'ordre des choses et au
i
'langage servile qui 1'exprime." All uses of intellectual
j
jdiscourse force the writer, furthermore "s'exprimer sur le
;plan du discours, constraint d1avoir position intellectu-
49 . . .
jelle." The rebellion for both Hassan and Bataille is m
I
ithe effort to ascertain a certain freedom that language has
(
i
I 170
sacrificed in its commitment to projected ends. Specific
cally, literature's subordination to the commitment to
represent reality has resulted in the loss of its capacity
"to embody the whole of human destiny . . . since all
I
action is [necessarily] fragmented and fractional. More
! often than not, the commitment is incomplete and literature
i
j is relegated to a limbo where it forfeits its sovereign
„ 50
. power,
| In terms of literary criticism, Hassan recognizes
similar commitments made at the expense of certain free
doms, for "the humanities in general and criticism in
j particular, intent on the systematization of their most
*
i radical insights, end by exempting themselves from the
' 51
i hazards of innovation," that is from the privileges of
i self renewal, Bataille's rebellious assertion of human
: sovereignty over established strictures/structures, posits
! literature as the means through which the state of human
j bondage comes to be realized. Human sovereignty can only
| be achieved, Bataille believes, through the negation of
i
| time, the irregular use of language and the affirmation of
i
| the erotic. Such a quest is, however, only for those "who
| have dared to use language irregularly in a spirit of
I
Promethean revolt," These, Bataille attests are "truly
i
[witnesses to the quest," and criticism likewise must
i
identify itself with "the writer's attempt to break free
i
171
52
of the law's circle."
In the Satanic/Promethean enterprise, freedom alone
is insufficient for Hassan. What the critic needs, he
j states, is "an erotic sense of style" and "an intuition of
i 53
j the New," for the manifestation of the reality of human
i life is, finally, in the will to change. To ignore change,
j that is, to function only in terms of certain given frame-
i
jworks, is to favor "the will to extinction, to witness the
I 54
jflight of the energy of life." Related specifically to
I
| criticism, Hassanfs Promethean task engages him in a
criticism that involves the testing of the edges of the
j imagination and of the traditional boundaries of critical
expectations. The "eroticism" of taking the imagination to
!its extreme edges results inevitably in its release into
; i
the "beyond" and culminates, in effect, in "death." By the
I
i same token, every death, for as much as it represents a
severance from past states that can be designated as the
55
"known," also becomes the germ of the new. The notion,
i
j as Hartmann points out, has its roots in Romanticism where
i
i
|consciousness is viewed as a sort of death-in-life and
I
;where "the mind which acknowledges the existence or past
Jexistence of immediate life knows that its present strength
j 5 6
,is based on a separation from that life."
i ,
j Critical eroticism is thus the state where mind is
i
I constantly alert to the life and death aspects of itself
172
and is motivated by what Hassan terms "desire." This is
the desire to recover metaphoric sensations of wholeness
in spite of the knowledge that every venture in this
j direction must end in certain death. The critical imagi-
| nation is thus put in motion: the postmodern critic is
! both caught within yet removed from the mobile configu-
. rations of his/her imagination. He/she is driven by the
j desire "touched by that quiddity or perversity of the
; artistic temperament which [he/she suspects] to be a kind
I
5 7
of love." But caught as he/she is in this movement, the
critic knows too that his/her eroticism or subversion of
| conventional limitations must propel him/her outward into
j "gesture and performance, outwards into action [and re-
I 58
i sponse] to change." In contrast to recent critical
i
j directions [specifically to Structuralism) which Hassan
' views as "imploding" upon language, the eroticism of the
i
■ paracritic takes him/her beyond discourse. Language,
; Hassan states, is not everything; there are what he terms
59
! one's own "verbal ceremonies" that await existence or
|
i
j tend to shape the existence of imaginative structures.
!
t
! What interests Hassan most is the fictive power of
jMind as it constitutes mental, cultural and even perhaps
<
' organic life. In view of this, Hassan proposes the ex-
i
| tension of literary criticism beyond its current academic
; limitations. The imagination, which derives its sense of
I
173
its own fictive powers from literary creation, can, Hassan
believes, project itself into "a design for life." It can,
in other words, participate in, with total self awareness
as to its own workings, the designation of reality. In
I
; this manner, humans can enter "the gnostic dream" which
I promises to lend existence a "larger and richer life,"
J Literary critics and humanists should, for their part,
I enter into dialogues with scientists, Hassan believes,
! since together they can engage in the creation of reality.
In the Nietzschean belief that everything that can
be thought is fictive, humans have, to a large extent, al
ways lived according to fiction. It is the realization of
jthis fictive edge to a life derived from contact with
I
{literature that lends the critic a certain power, for the
!
j realization provides for a release from the "vicious circle
jof determinate negation." This gnostic notion has been
! rendered in Borges' 1 allegory of the Gray Man in "The
i
j Circular Ruins" where the Magician dreams his son one organ
|or limb at a time within the confines of the circular
I
|ruins. Upon the destruction of the ruins by fire, the
i
:Dreamer/Magician discovers that he too has been dreamt by
I
I
another. In Hassan1s vision of the new gnosticism, the
'recognition of a compulsion which he has called desire
iconstitutes a driving force which "shapes our fictions and
!
iour future," allows "dreams [to] become fact." Propelled
174
by desire, "we create and procreate: and somehow transcend
, , „ 60
both.
In envisioning a larger role for the literary
critic, Hassan1s first move is to place him/her in the
i larger context of the world. The literary critic has a
(responsibility, he believes, to create alternative reali
ties to "plastic plains and cities of steel." The critic,
:Hassan adds, can in fact envision a state that is "all
jtogether human and more than human.With this articu-
|lation, Hassan, in effect, wrests the fires of creation
i
! from the artist and makes his gnostic dream merge with the
i
[Promethean enterprise. For where the Promethean will
i
i maintains "the creation and continual recreation of human
i consciousness," the gnostic vision directs itself to the
i
,point where "consciousness redeems itself in complete
i
|knowledge." The Promethean bent, furthermore, implies a
!certain will, according to Hassan— namely, the will that
i
|even wills to be wrong. But again, the redemptive aspect
i
j to this is suggested, for Prometheus is "that far-seer,
[who] falls forward into the fullness of time." Over and
|above everything, the Promethean rebel/gnostic dreamer
!implies imagination: he/she "attempts a radical reconsti-
!tution of the given world, [of] the fixed order of
. „62
.things.
The postmodern critic is, to a large degree, both
I
i
I . 175
rebel/destroyer and dreamer/fabricator. In the rebellion
that the Promethean critic attempts, there is always a fall
from the state of paradisiacal equilibrium in that he/she
| is party to the knowledge that the human consciousness will
| continually rebel against (and hence destroy) the given
' "until the sway of consciousness is extended indefi-
i 63
initely," With such a fall, consequently, the critic
i
j cannot recoil from the total commitment to recreate, to
' perpetuate the motion of creative extensions even if such a
commitment renders him/her vulnerable. For the destruction
of given constraints inevitably exposes the consciousness
to the crossfire of conflicting voices. Every increase in
I *
I consciousness, Hartman assures us, "is accompanied by an
i
increase in self-consciousness; it is of little wonder that
! the Romantics regarded analysis as "the dangerous passage
| ways of maturation. " The Romantics saw that such a passion
i
64
j leads to "murder [in order] to dissect." The postmodern
; Promethean critic, however, sustains life: i.e., he or she
must live in order to haruspicate with his/her own or-
65
gans; he/she evinces new life and new dimensions as they
; emerge from the dying fragments of the imagination. It is
I
jonly in this haruspication with one's own organs that a
»
i
|manifestation of the Promethean critical commitment is
;seen, for by doing so the critic, in essence, writes with
i
■his/her own life as Bataille puts it. In contrast,
i
I
i 176
conventional criticism which feeds off the leavings of
dead texts becomes no more than "l'exercise d'histoire,
litteraire ou dialogue d^rdgle avec 1'auteur." Hassan,
like Bataille, understands that criticism amounts to little
unless it is "1'expression d'une philosophie," or of a
religion, that it is, at least what one lives by. It is
only with such a commitment that a questioning of critical
possibilities can be ventured upon, according to Bataille.
For where there is a lack of such a perspective, there is
a figurative turning of one's back against the literary
text while one imagines that one is, in effect, discussing
.. 66
it.
Hassan's own commitment to the possibilities that
literature can open up in terms of the imagination turns,
finally, upon the retrieval of the human in humanism.
Eschewing the discrete enterprises of conventional critical
approaches which Hassan views as the assignment of "larger
questions to a religion, ideology or metaphysics," the
paracritic commits him/herself instead to the literary act
that always suggests the "sense of what it means to be
f \ 7
human in the cosmos." His statement, taken in terms of
literary criticism, necessitates a totally human response
to the text, for the text as a manifestation of human life
6 8
rightly belongs in life. In this regard, the sustained
exposition of conventional criticism holds no appeal for
Hassan: his writing snatches the tic of the imagination
177
jwith all of its perversities, lucid moments and tran
sitions .
Through the divisions Hassan creates in his
iarticles, for instance (these are designated either numeri-
t cally or lexically), the work of the imagination is
; reconstituted in the sense that they simulate the organi-
{
zation and integration of received data in the reading
'experience. But for all these activities, there is too
jthe quiddity that leads to digressions, asides and the
i
»
'mind's propensity to play games with pieces if in-form
ation. The chapter on "Postmodernism: A Paracritical
I Bibliography," for instance, sees the mind springing
j gleefully at the fact that "postmodernism includes works
I by writers as different as Barth, arthelme, ecker, eckett,
69
jense, lanchot, orges, recht, urroughs, utor." Similarly,
i •
;words that are commonly used are continually truncated and
I made to take on new meanings. "A Re-vision of literature"
I
J thus suggests not only a reworking of literature but
i
;proposes a new perspective while the "Pretext" to a
i
i
:literary text suggests the pretense involved in the writing
'of a prefatory body of words that is, in fact, usually
!written after a writer envisions the total work. Preamble,
!
I in turn, suggests a Postamble and in the face of critical
;dismemberment of his book The Dismemberment of Orpheus,
I
!
;Hassan attempts a "re-member-ance" of the critical
178
{ enterprise. All of this, undoubtedly, will tend to raise
a few academic eyebrows, but Hassan1s point in these games
{ seems to suggest that the acquisition of facts alone is
insufficient: the mind always gives itself the slip in
! its continual progression of creation, destruction and
irecreation. Scholarly fact-gathering cannot in fact keep
j up with the transitions that occur in the literary re-
; sponse.
What Hassan senses in the literary response is
mind eluding/deluding mind, and he, in turn, attempts to
i depict, through his eccentric use of words and manipu-
!lations of discursive forms, the transgressions in
transitions. Criticism, in this respect, approaches the
1 state of becoming a plastic art, for sight often more
jreadily receives Hassan-s intent before the centering work
:of intellection is able to supply the reader with the con-
jtents of the discourse. There is in this regard the
S tendency to reduce language to the level of the hieroglyphic
I
'or the gesture. This is the gesture which "speaks before
jwords (dit la parole avant les mots) . . . and which
|traces . . . a design in space." According to Derrida, the
jhieroglyphic is "the first signifier that signifies a
■signifier and not the thing itself or a directly presented
70
!signifred." Thus, in an age that no longer centers or
'locates centers in literature, the ingenuity of Hassan's
i
i
I 179
"criticism" lies in his recasting of language, with its
grammatical, syntactical and lexical strategies, in a
different mold, so to speak. As gesture, language is thus
no longer a system of signification but signification
; itself: it is no longer the object it points to which
i engages the attention but that which itself indicates.
Our traditional critical orientation, however,
tends toward the recuperation of the signified even in an
era where literature itself no longer communicates centered
meanings. In this respect, the focus has always been on
i
! what Rousseau termed the "gesticulation" rather than the
gesture. Gesture, Rousseau states in On the Origin of
Language, "sketches the shadow of presence, silently
i governs the first metaphor [while gesticulation] is an
i
; 71
^ indiscreet adjunct of speech." Having invented complex
I systems of language, Western man proceeded, as Rousseau
; puts it, to "forget the art of pantomime," that is, the
I
I
| immediate action of movement that he terms gesture. In
I
j place of this immediate movement that links intent and
jphenomena, the European "gesticulates"; his gesticulation,
| Rousseau adds, is a manifestation of futility over the loss
!
of presenescence brought about by systematized discourse.
|
iLike pantomime, gesture is seen as having been forsaken for
'the symbols and systems of language which are, finally, the
72
isupplementation of presence through artifice. The
180
ancient Egyptians are seen by Rousseau and Derrida as
"saying" in the liveliest way "what language fails to re
cover, for they [the ancients] did not say it, they showed
it."73
! There is, according to Derrida, a certain
! "savagery" to gesture, the savagery of "the state of
' 74
; society being born." In conjunction with Hassan's
j critical enterprise, the gesture and its savagery is seen
I as indication of presence, or rather of the "seizing of
presence" where language, since it occurs in time, can
only be "the dangerous supplement of fictive instanta-
75
neity." Language modified as gesture thus cuts through
j the "delay" language as signification brings about between
! intent and expression of the intent. Through such a
j modification, a metaphor of the moments of literary re-
i
I sponse is created and the Promethean enterprise of
| resolving past, present and future is craftily effected.
I
| There is, in this constituting of gesture as a metaphor
' of presenescence, a principle which is consistent with
i
j Hassan's delineation of the Titan as "a natural trickster
I
I . . . the creative principle of intelligence, creative yet
I
I 76
I essentially flawed because it is ignorant of its limit."
I
: For the success of Hassan's gesture lies in the fact that
j it produces the same effects as successful metaphors in
i that such metaphors "do not merely provide answers to
i
i
i
I 181
pre-existing questions [but] rather, by radically
restructuring our perceptions . , , [in fact create] new
questions, and in doing so largely determine the nature
77
of the answers," Specifically, through gesture, the
1 metaphor for presenescence, presence is both seized and
! the notion of this seizure created. This then is the
| "bliss of the gods" since pleasure, according to Derrida,
[ is always a receiving of presence. Conversely, what
j dislocates presence introduces difference and delay,
i
7 8
spacing between desire and pleasure.
The question that Hassan raises as to how man and
i
j process can be made the same is one that finally realizes
i
! the so-called "delay" language inflicts upon life, and
i
•particularly, on the moment-ousness of literary response,
j The delays language imposes upon the representation of
f
iresponse creates the situation whereby some part of the
I
! imagination continually seeks to bridge these postpone-
I
1 ments: mythopoetically, Isis the feminine principle thus
jmoves in search of the dismembered Osiris/Logos. Hers are
I
i the movements from one isolated frame of the imagination
to another, hers, the impassioned gestures, "the silent
i
|language of love [that] is not prelinguistic gesture, [but]
79
: mute eloquence."
I
There is in Hassan*s criticism of gestures a
■ medium of representation of the literary response that is
3
i
(
i
! 182
an alternative to sustained intellectual discourse. In as
much as it is motivated by "the wish to complete or comple
ment the will in some way until it enters a realm of human
reciprocity," not through the assertion of masculine/
conventional criticism but through the "veiling" of will
8 0
I and the "ornaments of language," paracriticism may
j perhaps be regarded as "feminine" criticism whose visible
J gesture, "more natural and more expressive can join itself
i
! as a supplement to speech, which is itself a substitute
!
for gesture."
In concrete terms, feminine criticism, or the
criticism that incorporates gesture, can be manifest and
is sustained in "the ideal essay, rooted etymologically in
risk, trial, examination, balance— rooted in both risk and
balance." Such an essay, Hassan admits, may not even be
criticism as we have known it, but he adds that "what
criticism may now require is a kind of text'that puts
o o
itself in jeopardy with other texts."
I
I
I
I 183
FOOTNOTES TO CHAPTER 5
i
I ^Raymond Olderman, "Paracriticisms," Contemporary
■ Literature, Vol. 17, No. 4 (Autumn, 1976), p. 584.
2
f ' Rene Wellek, Concept of Criticism, ed. by Stephen
i G. Nichols, Jr. (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University
j Press, 1963), p. 343.
! 3
! Ihab Hassan, Paracriticisms: Seven Speculations
of the Times (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975),
p. xv.
^Ibid.
5
Ihab Hassan, "On the New Cultural Conservatism,"
j Partisan Review, Vol. 34, No. 3 (1972), p. 428.
j ^Hassan, Paracriticisms, p. 28.
j ^Ibid., p. 23.
I 8
Ibid., p. 27.
I 9
! Richard Gilman, "The Idea of the Avant-Garde,"
j Partisan Review, Vol. 34, No. 3 (1972), p. 388.
. 10Ibid., p. 395.
!
■^Hassan, Paracriticisms, p. xl.
12
Ibid., p. xiv.
j ^Ibid. , p. 4 .
j ^Julia Kristeva, Recherches pour une semanalyse
; (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1969), p. 148.
t
i 15
I Michel Beaujour, "Eros and Nonsense," in Modern
i French Criticism: From Proust and Valery to Structuralism,
i ed. by John K. Simon (Chicago: University of Chicago
1 Press, 1972), p. 169.
184
1 f i
Georges Bataille, "Le Surrdalisme et Dieu,"
Critique, 4 (1948), p. 844.
17 . .
Hassan, Paracriticisms, p. 72.
■^Ibid. , p. 64 .
> 1 9
Oscar Wilde, "Intentions," in The Artist as
: Critic, ed. by Richard Ellman (New York: Random House,
! 1969), p. 392.
20
I Norman O. Brown, m Paracriticisms, p. 25.
i :
* 21
: Ihab Hassan, "The Critic as Innovator: A Para-
! critical Strip in X Frames," Paper read at the Modern
Language Association, December, 1976, "Fiction and Future:
An Extravaganza for Voice and Tape," in Paracriticisms.
1 ? ?
i Wilde, "Intentions," pp. 390-391.
i
i 23
Examples of convergences in the arts include:
Marc Sapote's Shuffle, a novel of loose pages in a box.
The pages are to be shuffled and read in any desired order.
Peter Clothier's John a novel (?) also on loose pages that
can be hung up as graphic art, or his book/sculpture Bob
I Went Home.
1 A. R. Ammons' Tape for the Turn of the Year written on a
i roll of adding machine tape,
i Jean Tinguely's self-destroying machines.
i 24
t Bataille, "Surrealisme et Dieu," p. 844.
' 25
j Hassan, Paracriticisms, p. 25.
J ^Hassan, "The Critic as Innovator," p. 10.
! 27
i Wilder, "Intentions," p. 405. A critic of another
vein, E. M. Cioran, terms this keeping "abreast of the
Incurable."
Gilman, "The Idea of the Avant-Garde," p. 39 5.
rtn
Wilde, "Intentions," p. 36 2.
31Ibid.
32
Hassan, Paracriticisms, p. 29.
185
33
Hassan, Paracriticisms, p. 29.
■^Geoffrey Hartman, The Fate of Reading (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 12.
35
Beaujour, "Eros and Nonsense," p. 16 3.
' 36Ibid.
37
I Hassan, Paracriticisms, p. 91.
i 3 8_ . -
' Beaujour, p. 166.
In Qu'est-ce que le structuralisme (Paris: Editions du
! Seuil, 1968), Todorow asks, "How could one articulate a
discourse that remains immanent to another discourse?
Prom the moment there is writing and no longer mere read
ing, the critic is saying something that the work he
i studies does not say, even if he claims to be saying the
' same thing," p. 100.
! 39
• Ihab Hassan, "A Re-Vision of Literature," New
j Literary History, Vol. 7, No. 1 (Fall, 1976), p. 1.
i 40
j Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight: Essays m
j the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford
i University Press, 1971), p. 107. I
i I
41
Jacques Derrida, "White Mythology," trans. by
! F. C. T. Moore, New Literary History 6 (Autumn, 1974),
! p. 277 fn.
i
i 4 2
! Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. by G.
| Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976),
j p. 233.
! 4 3
, Ibid., p. 233.
i 44
; E. M. Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, trans. by
i Richard Howard (New York: The New York Times Book Co.,
j 1968) , p. 62.
! 4 5 T.
i Ibid.
t
! 46
Beaujour, "Eros and Nonsense," p. 155.
47
j Cioran, The Temptation to Exist, p. 145.
1 4 8
; Beaujourn, "Eros and Nonsense," p. 16 3.
186
I
I
49
Bataille, "Le Surrealisrae et Dieu," p. 844.
50
Beaujour, "Eros and Nonsense," p. 166.
51 . . .
Hassan, Paracriticisms, p. xiv.
i 52
Beaujour, "Eros and Nonsense," p. 151.
' 5 3
Hassan, "The Critic as Innovator," p. 10.
54
Hassan, "On the New Conservatism," p. 43.
55
Hassan, "A Re-Vision of Literature."
"Every reading is a little death, which makes space for
, another beginning, another Death . . . and so I must . . .
| try to connect to make new connections of disconnections,
j Is that also the function of the Imagination, which ack
nowledges absence, inspects fracture— and always passes
through new thresholds?" p. 15.
' 56
i Geoffrey Hartman, Beyond Formalism {New Haven,
j Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 30.
57
Hassan, "The Critic as Innovator," p. 11.
5 8
Hassan, "A Re-Vision of Literature," pp. 11-12.
59
Ibid., p. 10.
i
: Hassan, Paracriticisms, p. 98.
j 61Ibid., p. 176.
1
! ° Ibid., p. 131.
63Ibid., p. 130.
64
Hartman, Beyond Formalism, p. 299.
65
Hassan, Paracriticisms, p. 128.
fi f \
; Bataille, "La Critique littdraire. Le Probl^me.
! Les Theories. Les Methodes." Critique, Vol. 2 (1974),
’ pp. 171-172.
C \ 1
, Hassan, Paracriticisms, p. xv.
6 8 ,.,
Ibid., p. xvi.
187
69
Hassan, Paracrxtxcxsms, p. 44.
70
Derrxda, Of Grammatology, p. 237.
71
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Orxgxn of Language,
j trans. by John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (New York:
Frederick Unger Publishing Co., 1966), p. 6.
t 72
Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 2 36.
7^Ibid. , p. 237 .
74Ibid.
\
75Ibid.
I
7 6
| Hassan, Paracriticisms, p. 127.
i ---------------------------------
' 77
David Edge, "Technological Metaphors and Social
i Control," New Literary History, Vol. 6 (Autumn, 1974),
p. 136.
i
7 8
Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 280.
79
Ibid., p. 236.
80
Hartman, The Fate of Reading, p. 2 56.
8 X
Derrida, Of Grammatology, p. 234.
1 82
! Hassan, "The Critic as Innovator," p. 14.
i
188
CHAPTER 6
' CONCLUSION
' Structuralism has demonstrated the mode in which
i thought constructs are devised by humans. It has demon-
!
| strated, furthermore, the extent to which thought refers
I
I itself to the constraints it establishes in order to arrive
at meaning or value. To a large extent, criticism, till
Structuralism, has always been an unconscious activity:
i
| to engage in criticism was to proceed at the task of re-
! cuperating the truth, the meaningful, the good, etc., in j
i
j terms of established constraints without due consideration ;
: as to how the constraints which enabled one to say "this
j is good, true or significant" actually functioned in one's
i examination of the object at hand.
i While Structuralism allowed for the realization
i that humans do in fact establish linguistic, historical or
t
sociological boundaries within which they function, it
also enabled the human sciences to see that there is a
j certain arbitrariness to these constraints. If all con-
I
I structs are only human-created constructs, why the priority
I
of one construct over another? Why the imperative to
I
i
189
function in terms of one set of constraints as opposed
to others? Furthermore, if humans are able to enclose and
create their reality by virtue of this creation/enclosure,
what is to prevent a conscious use of the tools of these
i
constraints (namely language) in the creation of new
i
| delineations and thus of new realities?
i
: Where literary criticism is concerned, these ques
tions can only suggest that an end is possible to the sort
of unconscious activity that engages the critic who is
i unaware as to his/her activities in terms of established
boundaries of thought. What the climate after Structur
alism establishes is the climate that can allow the critic
I
I
j to know what he/she is doing while engaged in thinking.
I
I This consciousness is thus a self-watching, the hermeneutic
I
I circle whereby continuity is established between the reader
t
] (and his/her world) and the text (and its world). In
thought, therefore, no distinct lines of demarcation sep
arate thinker from thought, creator from created object,
j critic from text or the rendition of the encounter with
| the text. But any thinking that falls under the rubric
j of a "discipline" eventually falls too within constraints
whose functions are to limit and order the field of
! thought. In criticism, and particularly, criticism of the
western tradition, the belief that the text is an object
, exterior to the psyche and history of the individual who
190
interrogates it forms the foundation in terms of which
criticism as a discipline interacts. It is this belief,
Roland Barthes tells us, which has given the critic the
right to exercise his/her "extraterritorial right" over
i i
1 the text/object.
Thinking about thinking/literature, however, opens
i
I up a way of seeing that thought, while able to accommodate
i itself in terms of "extra-territorial" constraints, is
i
i
never totally impeded or limited by them. Thought, or
specifically, thinking about thinking is always, as it
] occurs, reflexive and progressive and any semblance of
I
stability that is evident is imposed from the outside by
' constraints articulated by various disciplines. Criticism,
i j
j in this respect, and particularly criticism that operates |
| in terms of this reflexive mode, is seen as being hampered
i
|
; by an extra-territorial constraint. Specifically, the
logical discourse of traditional criticism, limited itself
by its own constraints, is also a means of limiting the
I field of what can or cannot be articulated. It is a dis
course that cannot, therefore, authentically represent the
reflexive nature of thinking, since, as Barthes has articu-
I lated, "criticism must include in its discourse . . . an
I . 2 . .
j implicit reflection on itself." Criticism, since it can-
I 3
j not be "a table of results or a body of judgements,"
; cannot, therefore, employ or be employed by a discourse
i
of isolation or tabulation.
191
In this respect, Ihab Hassan's Paracriticism is
seen to be both the realization as to the reflexive nature
of thought and the effort at rendering this reflexiveness
in terms of a discourse that authenticates this quality of
i
'thinking. Paracriticism, as such, is not a method. Every
'method limits its activities and objects by virtue of the
i
limpositions it makes upon its field prior to its analysis
'of it. Paracriticism is perhaps a "sign-post" (Hassan
terms it a speculation) that indicates the epistemological
flux; it asks that this flux be truthfully represented in
I terms of a discourse that does not seek to impose its own
I
(priorities over its function to represent this flux. But
I
(while it asks for a truthful representation of the reading
jexperience, Paracriticism is not truth seeking, its object
,is not to retrieve the meaningful, the good or the true
'from the text or the world. The discourse it chooses is
inadequate in the task of truth seeking— the recuperation
of truths is dependent upon the primacy of constraints
jsuch as history, philosophy or what Foucault has termed
I
"the already said," and Paracriticism's discourse is one
i
that constantly moves to escape the constraining effects
of the discourses of history, science or even that of
.traditional literary criticism. Paracriticism interests
j
(itself not in truths, but in the manner in which these
jtruths can be constituted. It acquires the knowledge of
I
i
I 192
the manner in which this constitutive act occurs by exer
cising its right to create new constraints by virtue of
: its creative use of language.
Paracriticism must, therefore, reject the discourse
1 of traditional criticism, it must reject the formalities
I
! and the postures if it is to fulfill its intentions. Para-
i criticism incorporates in its discourse the gestures of
j its intent. It employs language as a means of indicating
the transitions and manifestations of thinking. It does
' so by exploiting the signifying propensities of language
I
I
i and the printed page in order to approximate the mechanics
involved as thought frames undergo the transformations and
configurations which give rise to meanings,
j Paracriticism's use of the "hieroglyphic" function
j of language lends it, however, an idiosyncratic aspect,
| but this characteristic is a means of questioning our
habits of reading, namely, the habit of reading for sig-
nifieds. Instead of reading simply for the information
»
! that can be recuperated, Paracriticism attempts to re-
i
focus the attention upon the ludic enterprise that gives
rise to the shaping of information both in the act of
thinking as well as in the representation of the act.
| Conventional criticism itself has always functioned
I
i (albeit unconsciously) in terms of postures and rituals
i
that are meant to convey the high seriousness of its
193
enterprise. The ludic element of Paracriticism is an
attempt at indicating the postures for what they are and
in doing so Paracriticism fosters the awareness as to the
differences that can arise between postures affected with
I
i
certain ends in mind and the signifying functions of dis-
i
! course m of itself.
i
I Because Paracriticism is, plainly put, an activity
J
J that concerns itself with the emergence of forms of thought
I
j and less concerned with the produced content, its repre
sentation cannot be sustained in the large study. It
finds the representation of its vision and aims in the
smaller essay, in aphorisms, in pictorial manipulations
, of the page through typographical variation and even
J through techniques borrowed from the art, film and sound
| media.
, As a criticism which strives toward a sense of
: wholeness, Paracriticism draws from the party of human
memory in order to respond to, and, subsequently, to both
j reconstitute the known and to reshape the new or the yet
! unknown. Because it makes the absence of limitation its
!
■ prime purpose, Paracriticism's field is theoretically uni-
i
j versal. Because it is concerned with a field of study or
i knowledge, Paracriticism cannot therefore deal with the
specific or the specialized. The Paracritic is always a
I
I generalist, comparatist, a collector/participant in
I
j 194
r : --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
changing fields of knowledge. Ihab Hassan's own "pool"
of thought includes literatures of the Romantic through
postmodern eras. His essays incorporate material that is,
I among other things, Cabalistic, futuristic, technological
i
! and scientific texts. In the interplay between these
i texts, it is demonstrated that thought can never really
I
I be a matter of spacialization or categorization, and that
i any such activity comes after the fact of thinking itself.
The literary text, on these terms, is thus never viewed
as an object created in isolation, in isolation, that is
from the circumstances from which it emerged, or from the
reader and the reader's own surroundings. The reading
: encounter, furthermore, requires the recognition of the
j unification of the world of the text, the world of the
j reader and the field created in the reading encounter it-
i self. Paracriticism attempts to depict this unification,
| particularly the movements toward this unification.
It is its attention to the movement or processes
i of thinking that identify Paracriticism's interest in the
t
; restoration of the human factor in criticism. It is this
interest which constitutes the rebellious edge to Para-
: criticism, for in the name of objectivity, literary criti-
i cism has always sought the negation of the human voice in
i
I the execution of its work. If rebellion can be defined
}
' as the search for authenticity on the part of individuals
I
195
or groups, then Paracriticism's rebellious edge is in its
countering of systems that have traditionally eradicated
the human presence in the criticial enterprise. Paracrit
icism reconstitutes systems and the self with the aim of
I restoring the world to humans without the mediation of
1 superimposed constructs. Every feature of this reconsti-
; tution thus amounts to the testimony of the self in terms
t
; of the world and the text. It is only with this self
testifying that the unhampered mediation of the world be
comes possible.
i
i
i
196
| FOOTNOTES TO CONCLUSION
I
j ^Roland Barthes, "What Is Criticism?
! Essays, trans. by Richard Howard (Evanston:
! University Press, 1972), p. 257.
^Ibid.
3Ibid.
I
I
I
I
I
i
!
i
i
Critical
Northwestern
197
| B I B L I O G R A P H Y
I
i
I
I
i
I
j
|
i
19 8
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Asset Metadata

Creator Blinde, Patricia (author)

Core Title Avant-garde criticism: The criticism of exhaustion

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program Comparative Literature

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag comparative literature,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor [illegible] (committee chair), [illegible] (committee member), Monge, Peter (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c17-734985

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