{"id":12483,"date":"2010-07-13T00:00:26","date_gmt":"2010-07-13T04:00:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/?p=12483"},"modified":"2010-07-13T00:00:26","modified_gmt":"2010-07-13T04:00:26","slug":"frye-and-poststructuralism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/2010\/07\/13\/frye-and-poststructuralism\/","title":{"rendered":"Frye and Poststructuralism"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"anatomy\"<\/a> \"grammatology\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Tomorrow is Frye’s birthday, and the day after that is Derrida’s.\u00a0 It’s a good time to reflect on their fateful collision as two leading figures in literary criticism a generation ago.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

From the time of the <\/em>Anatomy Frye maintained that criticism should be a system of interpenetrating rather than conflicting modes.\u00a0 But as poststructural critics came to take center stage in the 1970s and 1980s, Frye grew less sanguine about realizing his critical ideal.\u00a0 In his last major works, <\/em>Words with Power and <\/em>Myth and Metaphor, he began to take an oppositional stance toward poststructuralism, especially to cultural criticism and deconstruction.\u00a0 But as one might expect from a critic who very seldom argued in a public way against critical views different from his own, his critique of these two postmodern approaches is relatively muted.\u00a0 This is not the case, however, in Frye\u2019s unpublished notebooks, where his critique of, say, Derrida, is explicit and direct.\u00a0 The degree of Frye\u2019s opposition to cultural criticism (or what he calls ideology) and deconstruction is almost always sublimated or displaced in what he chose to publish; in the notebooks, it is not.\u00a0 The scores of entries that Frye makes in his late notebooks about poststructural critical positions reveal the anxiety he has about his own position in the critical world, as well as his concession that the model of interpenetrating critical visions is more or less doomed.\u00a0 And they reveal directly what is at times almost concealed in his late published work.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Material that follows is from Frye\u2019s notebooks.\u00a0 The first section is from an unedited version of a notebook Frye wrote in the late 1980s.\u00a0 After paragraph [732] the entries come from several of Frye\u2019s other notebooks.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

On Derrida, de Man, Foucault, Deconstruction, Marxist and Feminist Criticism, Ideologies, and Other Varieties of Post-______ Talk from the <\/em>Late Notebooks.
\n<\/strong><\/p>\n

[4]\u00a0 The story element in myth (mythos<\/em>) links it to folktales.\u00a0 The function of literature is to recreate the myth behind the ideology.\u00a0 All poets are affected by the ideologies of their time, but criticism discovers layers of meaning (Hopkins\u2019 underthought and overthought, Derrida\u2019s deconstruction) distinguishing the two. decon discovers layers of meaning<\/p>\n

[7]\u00a0 The language of ideology, being thesis-language, contains its own opposite.\u00a0 Ideology functions properly in a tolerance that tries to contain the opposite.\u00a0 Dogmas that exclude the opposite are pernicious.\u00a0 The worst are those that back up political dogma with a religious or quasi-religious one.\u00a0 ideologies of exclusion<\/p>\n

[28]\u00a0 It\u2019s ironic that Marxism, which tried to define ideology as the rationalizing of non-Marxists, should have turned into the one movement of our day that absolutizes ideology.\u00a0 absolutizing of ideology in Communist movements.<\/p>\n

[44]\u00a0 Criticism approaches a literary work which is a metaphor-cluster made explicit.\u00a0 Why do we need the critic?\u00a0 Because there\u2019s so much implicit in the metaphor-cluster that he didn\u2019t make explicit.\u00a0 Mainly, of course, the relation of contexts, to other cultures, of words.\u00a0 \u201cDeconstruction\u201d is such a dreary negative word for all this.\u00a0 \u201cDeconstruction\u201d is \u201ca dreary negative word\u201d for the process of making explicit what in the poem remains only implicit, the relation of the contexts of words.<\/p>\n

[63]\u00a0 I\u2019ve often noticed how stories with a strong mythical (plot) emphasis are placed in a framework, or are assumed to be told to the writer, or discovered by him in a drawer, etc.\u00a0 Look up that storm story, where there are four or five wrappings.\u00a0 It\u2019s as though we were supposed to dig for the story underneath the ideological surface: a model of what \u201cdeconstruction\u201d ought to be.<\/p>\n

[79]\u00a0 So many dreary disputes in 20th c. French literature where we have non-Marxist writers saying they just want to be apolitical and neutral, with the Marxists telling them that \u201cneutral\u201d statements are just as political ones.\u00a0 Of course they are.\u00a0 They\u2019re the other half of the Marxist ideology, and just as essential to it.<\/p>\n

[93]\u00a0 I am told that the structure of the Anatomy is impressive but futile, because it would make every other critic a Gauleiter of Frye.\u00a0 People don\u2019t realize that I\u2019m building temples to\u2013\u2013well, \u201cthe gods\u201d will do.\u00a0 There\u2019s an outer court for casual tourists, an inner court for those who want to stay for communion (incidentally, the rewards of doing so are very considerable).\u00a0 But I\u2019ve left a space where neither they nor I belong.\u00a0 It\u2019s not a tower of Babel: that tries to reach something above itself: I want to contain what, with a shift of perspective, contains it.\u00a0 Why am I so respected and yet so isolated?\u00a0 Is it only because I take criticism more seriously than any other living critic?<\/p>\n

[97]\u00a0 It seems more natural to begin with myth & concern rather than with metaphor & identity.\u00a0 But it\u2019s involved with this whole \u201cwriting\u201d nonsense.\u00a0 As soon as you \u201csee\u201d a joke it\u2019s written, in some sense or other: what you hear up to that point is unintelligible except as sound, hence the musical metaphors.\u00a0 And every narrative is a displacement of a metaphorical diagram, much as the 5th Symphony is a displacement of the tonality of C minor.\u00a0 When one applies such a conception to Sartor Resartus<\/em>, say, one can make the link with my deconstruction as an attempt to get past ideology to myth.\u00a0 [Frye is actually deconstructing ideology in an effort to get past it to myth, and he says as much in one notebook entry.]<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

[101]\u00a0 I used to say that the Reformation ideology leaned to the past and Marxism to the future: but maybe all ideologies lean to the past in the end.\u00a0 Marxists are a lot hazier about the future socialist society than about the horrors of \u201crevisionism,\u201d or escaping the weight of the sacred texts.\u00a0 Jews, too, with their future Messiah.<\/p>\n

[105]\u00a0 I shouldn\u2019t have to say that I\u2019m not postulating a golden age of pure myth with no admixture of ideology; but because of the extraordinary adherence of some readers to such inferences, I do have to say it.\u00a0 Such an age is like the Garden of Eden, not a description of anything that happened in the past, but a postulate that makes what follows more intelligible: that raises the question of the function of postulated myths, which will bear thinking.<\/p>\n

[108]\u00a0 If there\u2019s no real difference between creation & criticism, I have as much right to build palaces of criticism as Milton had to write epic poems.\u00a0 My whole and part interchange works here too: inside the Anatomy, everyone is a disciple & to some degree a captive of Frye\u2013\u2013every writer has a captive audience\u2013\u2013but surely one can finish the book & then do as one likes, with something of me inside him.\u00a0 If he doesn\u2019t have something of me inside him, he won\u2019t, at this time of history, have anything of much use to say as a critic.<\/p>\n

[128]\u00a0 Secondary myths are spawned from anxious ideology that wants to eliminate the other half of itself.\u00a0 When Frank Kermode gives anti-Semitism as an example of a myth, he is (a) expressing a very common prejudice against all myth (b) defining the kind of myth that\u2019s spawned by a hysterically one-sided ideology.\u00a0 Such one-sided ideological myths are really mob creations, and a mob must<\/em> project the suppressed other side of its clich\u00e9 on a scapegoat figure.<\/p>\n

[130]\u00a0 Later Ibsen should be added to the imaginative deconstruction of ladders, towers, mountains.\u00a0 The Master Builder<\/em>, an influence on FW [Finnegans Wake<\/em>], is almost a wheel-of-fortune allegory; the other egotistical monsters, Borkman and Rubek, climb a mountain to commit suicide.\u00a0 Incidentally in WDA [When the Dead Awaken<\/em>] the sculptor\u2019s former model & mistress, Irene, makes a comment suggesting that for her transfiguration is a far higher achievement than resurrection.\u00a0 I\u2019ve got Romersholm\u2019s millrace & white horse elsewhere: here as in WDA there\u2019s the communion of death image we meet at the end of the Mill on the Floss.\u00a0 I need more theory to connect these examples: otherwise it\u2019s just archetype-spotting.<\/p>\n

[132]\u00a0 Chapter Four then deals with the apocalyptic metaphorical cluster, concentrating on the key images, garden, ladder-tower-mountain, way, etc.\u00a0 The four forms of primary concern are doubtless the organizing principle.\u00a0 After that it gets hazier.\u00a0 The most natural next step, I should think, would be the descent from the P creation myth to the ideology of four levels, and the deconstruction of this after the Romantic movement.\u00a0 That would naturally take one to the structure of patriarchal authority into which the J narrative descended.\u00a0 After that there\u2019s nothing left but the end of ideological dialectic in the life-death antithesis.\u00a0 This has its two forms, the Adonis form of resurrection & the Hermes form of transfiguration.\u00a0 The unsealing of Hermes is also the unsealing of the Alpha-Omega book, the alphabet of forms.<\/p>\n

[142]\u00a0 I suppose the vogue for deconstruction has to do with its Romanticism: it takes off from the Romantic conception of creation as something opposed to the<\/em> creation.<\/p>\n

[143]\u00a0 The more doctrinaire forms of Marxism (Stalin & the gang-of-four Maoists) attempt to replace mythology wholly with ideology, and, consistently with that, deny that anything transcends the human individual except the human social.\u00a0 I\u2019ve often felt that an over-emphasis on the social perspective, whether Marxist or not, ignores the whole \u201claboratory\u201d aspect of fiction: the isolating of an individual from his social context to study those things that only the individual can experience.\u00a0 (Which is practically every experience in itself<\/em>, as distinct from its similarities in others.)\u00a0 The question is that the mythological perspective of tradition may lead to some kind of religious transcendental, and it so often does in practice.\u00a0 [For Frye the individual vs. social dialectic does not require that one make an an either\/or choice.\u00a0 The self never excludes the other, even when the other is more than a community of other selves.\u00a0 The religious impetus behind Frye\u2019s work means that for him something transcendent may emerge from social mythology.<\/p>\n

[151]\u00a0 The Promethean vision descends from the P creation account and the vision of natura naturata as a ladder.\u00a0 It gets deconstructed in Rousseau, & of course Marx: wonder if Marx is a mythologist after all, the ideological anxiety being supplied by Lenin.\u00a0 The Eros vision descends from the J account (and Plato) and gets similarly deconstructed by Rousseau and, more effectively, Darwin.\u00a0 (Note that, as the metonymic symbol for the dianoia {or rather, I guess, it\u2019s synecdoche)} is the ladder for Prometheus, with all its extensions, so it\u2019s the tree of life for Eros.\u00a0 Many popular books on evolution display the process in a tree-diagram.<\/p>\n

[161]\u00a0 Don\u2019t go all out for metaphor: sunset & sunrise, a fixed flat earth, rail tracks meeting at the horizon, are primary facts of experience but still illusions.\u00a0 I have, whatever Ricoeur says, a place for the referent (the \u201csign\u201d section of AC, e.g.), and it\u2019s only in the final apocalyptic vision that the referents become equal with each other.\u00a0 I mean identical.\u00a0 \u201cReality,\u201d like the subconscious in Lacan, is linguistically structured, being mainly a set of fossilized human thoughts.\u00a0 Even the landscape is what it is because the early settlers cut down the trees.\u00a0 And behind that is what ultimately goes back to Berkeley: to be X is to be \u201cperceived\u201d as intelligible.<\/p>\n

[182]\u00a0 Shirley<\/em>: full of characters spouting ideologies, including naturally the author\u2019s own.\u00a0 Toryism, radicalism, rationalized laissez faire, the sexist ideology Charlotte Bronte knew so much about; economic miseries of Orders in Council; the understandable but mistaken tactics of the Luddites, all dated back to 1812 from the 1840\u2019s to provide the hindsight of the Chartist parallels.\u00a0 Other books studying these topics directly might have more & better organized information, but if written in ideological language, however detached or partisan, would have to treat all individuals as case histories.\u00a0 What makes Shirley<\/em> and other works of fiction irreplaceable is the assimilation of all this to the primary concerns of food (i.e. jobs), sexual love, work & play.<\/p>\n

[183]\u00a0 Hence the \u201cvertical\u201d or mythological tradition becomes relevant too.\u00a0 But just as most social criticism ignores everything really germane to the structure<\/em> of the book, so most Wissenschaft<\/em> criticism confines itself to clich\u00e9s about Byron & Scott & the Gothic novel or whatever.\u00a0 That\u2019s traditional crap, corresponding to Terry Eagleton\u2019s Marxist crap: the oversimplified Toryism of Helstone & radicalism of Yorke are the prototypes of this in the novel itself.\u00a0 But novels are \u201ctracts for the times\u201d without hindsight of history.<\/p>\n

[220]\u00a0 If consciousness of the \u201canalog I\u201d didn\u2019t exist before (effectively) 800-700 B.C., then the paradoxical role of a nothingness at the heart of Being goes with a separation of subject & object.\u00a0 Perhaps the Locke era marks the end of this transitional phase: I\u2019ll have to get clearer the Foucault thesis that \u201cmankind\u201d is a 17th c. conception.<\/p>\n

[221]\u00a0 Anyway, the metaphor chapter should, after establishing the hypothetical nature of literary metaphor, go on to examine, first, the lover metaphor with all its paradoxes, and then the identity-with metaphor, starting with Theseus\u2019 \u201clunatic\u201d and Jaynes \u201challucination.\u201d\u00a0 If I could line up my GC metaphor-metonymy-simile sequence with Jaynes & Foucault it would help.\u00a0 Not that I\u2019d want to claim their authority for my own quite different thesis.<\/p>\n

[224]\u00a0 I don\u2019t see how deconstruction techniques fit the Bible at all: you have to start with a lisible<\/em> text by an author you can \u201csupplement,\u201d and such a text doesn\u2019t exist.\u00a0 \u201cThe Word made flesh\u201d certainly sounds like the supreme logocentric claim, but there isn\u2019t any \u201ctranscendental signified\u201d except the Father, who disappears into the Word.\u00a0 So I think there must be what Derrida doesn\u2019t allow: a polysemous structure that directs all the \u201cdeconstruction.\u201d\u00a0 On the other hand, the excursus on Gen. 6:1-4 in Charlotte Bronte\u2019s Shirley<\/em> is a deconstruction of it in a way that none of her other purely literary references, such as the one to Coriolanus<\/em> even approach.\u00a0 Incidentally, this is a quite different question from that of popularity as the direct expression of an archetype.\u00a0 supplement<\/p>\n

[229]\u00a0 Surely, if \u201cdeconstruction\u201d starts with a construal text, that text prescribes a direction<\/em> for deconstruction, otherwise you wander forever in a wilderness of words.\u00a0 Such a direction involves one at once in polysemy, whatever the particular steps in the verbal ladder may be.\u00a0 Surely too the conception of \u201csupplement\u201d indicates this.\u00a0 I suppose the traditional fears about how \u201cdangerous\u201d a speculation may be if it doesn\u2019t stay on the track provoked this reaction.\u00a0 supplement<\/p>\n

[241]\u00a0 I wish my mind were clearer about Derrida: it\u2019s silly to make him into a sort of critical Antichrist trying to abolish incarnational texts.\u00a0 To me all texts are incarnational, and the climax of the entire Christian Bible, \u201cthe Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us,\u201d is the most logocentric sentence ever written.\u00a0 My only hunch is the one I\u2019ve recorded: that if you start with one text rather than another, that text prescribes a certain direction<\/em> of comment & deconstruction & what not, and the direction reduces to a polysemous pilgrimage.\u00a0 You can\u2019t just wander in the wilderness of words forever.\u00a0 A lot of post-structural stuff seem to me just irresponsible and undirected polysemy.<\/p>\n

[247]\u00a0 I think it\u2019s Norbert Wiener, the cybernetics man, who says that communication overcomes entropy.\u00a0 Not always: as with water & fire in the Bible, there\u2019s a dead word and a living word.\u00a0 Some books are \u201cdead things,\u201d in Milton\u2019s phrase, forgotten or surviving arbitrarily in the memory: others take us in the opposite direction from death.\u00a0 What Derrida is attacking is the fallacy that to have a living word you have to have a living person speaking it.\u00a0 The living speaker is only a symbol of a creative word that keeps throwing up supplement after supplement, yet always in a specified direction. supplement<\/p>\n

[249]\u00a0 Antitypos in Greek has the primary meaning of striking back, resisting, adverse.\u00a0 This corresponds exactly to the way that Jesus\u2019 \u201cI am the way\u201d deconstructs the image of journey by turning it into a solid person.\u00a0 It occurs in Hebrews 9:24 as well as in I Peter (typos is in Heb. 8:5, and hypodeigma, the post-Platonic form of paradeigma, in 9:23.\u00a0 The AV usually translates that and typos as \u201cpatterns\u201d or \u201ccopies\u201d).<\/p>\n

[253]\u00a0 The two dragons I want to kill are Bultmann\u2019s \u201cdemythologize\u201d and Derrida\u2019s \u201clogocentric.\u201d\u00a0 The Bible is myth from Genesis to Revelation, & to demythologize it is to obliterate it.\u00a0 The climax of the (Christian) Bible is \u201cThe Word became flesh, and dwelt among us,\u201d which is the most logocentric sentence ever written.\u00a0 But I must be careful to make sure I understand them & am not just saying that my views of mythos & logos are different.\u00a0 Derrida<\/p>\n

[259]\u00a0 I suppose the principle of deconstruction is that all \u201cliteral\u201d meaning, in the ordinary sense, is a projection<\/em> of a metaphorical verbal body.\u00a0 Examples are the \u201calways\u201d and \u201canyway\u201d of pilgrimage or journey metaphors.\u00a0 What we take \u201cliterally,\u201d in this sense, is the direction of the metaphors suggested by the author, without examining further.\u00a0 Poetry is language where this procedure is obviously inadequate.\u00a0 Every narrative is thus a selected or chosen arrangement of metaphors.<\/p>\n

[281]\u00a0 The old idea that all kinds of mysteries of knowledge can be extracted from myth is, in modern terms, the fact that discursive prose is verbal work, while myths, like literature, are verbal play, & consequently can be \u201cdeconstructed\u201d endlessly.\u00a0 Except that in practice you have to set up a straight polysemous path from your construal starting point.\u00a0 This conception of play integrates the kookiest notion of criticism into the centre of contemporary theory.<\/p>\n

[282]\u00a0 Poets meet the supremacy of ideology in two ways: by allegory and by realistic \u201cdisplacement.\u201d\u00a0 Or both, of course: Marxism demands of literature realism with an allegorical basis.\u00a0 \u201cNot ideas about the thing but the thing itself\u201d is a plea for anti-realistic metaphor disguised as a call to realism.<\/p>\n

[304]\u00a0 Marx owes his colossal status as a modern thinker to the incisiveness with which he exposes the gap between the ideology of capitalism and the primary concerns of food and shelter that it overrides.\u00a0 Thus he begins with \u201ccommodity\u201d in its secondary & primary references (reminding one of Faulconbridge\u2019s speech in King John<\/em>, even though \u201ccommodity\u201d means something rather different there).<\/p>\n

[307]\u00a0 Further on one: ideology is different from other things expressed in discursive prose because it\u2019s apologetic and metonymic.\u00a0 The world can\u2019t be perfect, so the ideological structure is put for<\/em> the ideal as the best available.\u00a0 Also, it\u2019s explicitly partial: whenever a religion or political or national loyalty is differentiated from another, ideology is present.\u00a0 That would allow for social types of primary concern, such as the desire to know.<\/p>\n

[311]\u00a0 Jesus\u2019 use of the Son-Father identity leading to the grotesque myth that God is male.\u00a0 Isaiah 49:15; 66:13; Matt. 23:37.\u00a0 Note how the mythical nature of the Gospels is, so to speak, postponing Jesus until the post-Easter hindsight.\u00a0 Especially in John, but then Luke\u2019s climax comes in Acts 1-2.\u00a0 The presence of Christ is in the meeting of the gospel & the reader: they don\u2019t point to a specific person outside them, or what Derrida calls a transcendental signifier.\u00a0 John identifies Jesus with the Logos: I think the Greek history of the word Logos is at a minimum here, but he can\u2019t have been unaware of that history.\u00a0 (Re the above: Christ was God and<\/em> a male, but the latter only before Easter.)<\/p>\n

[318]\u00a0 When logos established its supremacy over mythos, mythos was deprived of its ideological function.\u00a0 It then had to split into two parts: literary or hypothetical myth, and myth declared to be true, which meant myth with a \u201ctranscendental signified,\u201d as Derrida calls it.\u00a0 As that, it could be recreated as literature, but anxiety insisted on a \u201cliteral\u201d or external basis.\u00a0 Hence what I call the Goethe (or rather Faust) fallacy: in the beginning God did something, and the words tell us what he did.\u00a0 The same tendency is followed today by the jigglers and jugglers of the gospel narratives.<\/p>\n

[331]\u00a0 Morris Eaves wants me to write an updated Polemical Introduction to this book: I don\u2019t know that I have that much command of the whole critical scene.\u00a0 He seems to feel that the post-structurals have control of the Comp. Lit. scene but that what\u2019s in central vogue now in English is a neo-historical movement, with strong Marxist affinities, trying to identify the mythical as a special case of the ideological.\u00a0 He spoke of being an examiner of a \u201cwhiz kid\u201d who\u2019s written something about death, mostly Kleist in substance, Heidegger in method\u2013\u2013and felt she was really following the funeral cortege of Paul de Man.<\/p>\n

[333]\u00a0 The main point of Chapter Two is, I suppose, that the Hebrew Bible is written (Derrida is, I understand, a Sephardic Jew) but that the Christian Bible is also enclosed in a presence.<\/p>\n

[338]\u00a0 (I may have this.)\u00a0 When I first began to think about a book on the literary context of the Bible, the literary critics specifically interested in the Bible were few and apologetic; today they are many and confident.\u00a0 The number coming the other way, from Biblical scholarship to an interest in literary criticism, has increased proportionately.\u00a0 I am now therefore not a speaker of a prologue but a member of an aging chorus.\u00a0 Of course every scholar of senior years living in the nineteen eighties has lived through forty or fifty such revolutions even in the fields that directly concern him.\u00a0 This particular revolution may confirm the accuracy of my instincts thirty years ago, but does little for me now. However:<\/p>\n

Set the word and its origin and put the maker in his place.<\/p>\n

So counsels the Sepher Yetzirah (Book of Creation), a pioneering work of Kabbalism that uses the letters of the Hebrew alphabet as symbols for the creative principles of the world.\u00a0 I have taken its advice to refer to the ordering of one\u2019s own mind, and in that context have tried to follow it.<\/p>\n

[340]\u00a0 Perhaps the metaphor chapter should establish the metonymic nature of all ideology: what\u2019s in charge is put for<\/em> the ideal, because we obviously can\u2019t have the ideal.\u00a0 We move through erotic metaphors (Eliade, I see, has an essay on androgyne symbolism) to existential metaphor, or expression of identity with light or spirit, which are forms of panoramic apocalypse.\u00a0 Participating apocalypse comes when we enter the Word, which up to that time is an apocryphon, remove all the seals and identify with it\u2013\u2013Ezekiel ate it.\u00a0 This is, I suppose, one of the things meant by \u201cdeconstructing\u201d the text through the writing to identity with the presence.\u00a0 For again, just as mythos is<\/em> logos in Christ, so presence is<\/em> absence, or rather, the presences of Christ & reader (with the Spirit) unite in the Kingdom of absence.\u00a0 (That phrase is Dennis Lee\u2019s.)<\/p>\n

[341] \u00a0That\u2019s where my prerevolutionary point goes, also the Burke-Paine token-metonymy one.\u00a0 We enter a world where Jesus is still alive, a world opposite to anything \u201cthe quest for the historical Jesus\u201d could ever reach.\u00a0 This direct or inner deconstructing search is the \u201cmystic\u201d Boehme-Blake approach\u2013\u2013at least that\u2019s a very direct kind.<\/p>\n

[356]\u00a0 I\u2019m thinking now of three chapters on myth, metaphor & symbol.\u00a0 Then an intercalary chapter on the whole Bible, applying the first three to it & incorporating the GC [The Great Code<\/em>] theses.\u00a0 Then the four deconstructed Bibles and their literary infiltrations.\u00a0 That\u2019s 7\/8 altogether.\u00a0 It\u2019s doubtless in the intercalary chapter that the way and ladder imagery goes (myth & metaphor, respectively: perhaps the spirit is a circle enclosing the cross.\u00a0 Or the still point at the centre which is also the circumference). The last four chapters might be called something like \u201cRivers of Eden,\u201d & should have the epigraph from the Sepher Yetzirah.<\/p>\n

[363]\u00a0 Or, I might stop this book at Chapter Four, the recapitulation of the Bible, on the principle that a big book is a big evil, and leave the four deconstructions for later.<\/p>\n

[389]\u00a0 I think \u201cdeconstruction\u201d is something literature does to itself, whether with anxiety or without it.\u00a0 As a critical technique it seems to me popular because facile, a \u201cnew criticism\u201d analysis with no holds barred.\u00a0 Of course I may be wrong: this nearly always includes an unspoken \u201cbut I damn well don\u2019t think so.\u201d\u00a0 Not in this case, though: I\u2019m really very uncertain.\u00a0 But my theory of modes seems to me better because it follows a pattern that literature itself creates; in criticism, the medieval four levels theory (the \u201clevels\u201d metaphor is expendable) supplies a rationale for the procedure.<\/p>\n

[428]\u00a0 I gather that Bhaktin\u2019s [sic] \u201cdialogism\u201d is gradually replacing \u201cdeconstruction\u201d as a buzzword.\u00a0 Of course there\u2019s dialogue between writer & reader, but much more goes on than that: it\u2019s more like an interpenetrating of identities.\u00a0 Montaigne\u2019s \u201cconsubstantial\u201d remark shows that the writer\u2019s ego and the reader\u2019s ego can\u2019t<\/em> interpenetrate: they\u2019re like the old-style atoms, or, more accurately, like the Leibnitzian monads.\u00a0 In this century we have to forget that \u201catom\u201d means the unsplittable (or did mean it) or that the individual is the \u201cindividable.\u201d\u00a0 Two egos identifying would be like two billiard balls copulating.<\/p>\n

[473]\u00a0 Why are Marxist & Freudian approaches to criticism so sterile and so quickly exhausted when Marx & Freud themselves are so endlessly suggestive and illuminating?\u00a0 I suppose because the centre of gravity remains in Marx or Freud and turns all literature into an allegory of Marxism or Freudianism.\u00a0 (I think something similar is true of feminist criticism, even if it has as yet no comparable third figure.)\u00a0 So I ought to know how silly it would be to turn my book into any sort of Biblical or Christian allegory.<\/p>\n

[478]\u00a0 All irony, whether of content or of form, is relative to a norm, and is unintelligible without that norm.\u00a0 It seems essential to keep on saying this in an age of \u201cdeconstruction,\u201d where the illusion grows up that the norms are no longer there.\u00a0 Tristram Shandy<\/em> was \u201codd\u201d to Johnson and \u201ctypical\u201d to some Russian formalist [Viktor Shklovsky], but it\u2019s not typical of anything but a fashion.\u00a0 (When parody becomes very fashionable, the illusion grows up that the norms have disappeared.)<\/p>\n

[494]\u00a0 Irony depends on its deviation from an opposing norm: the sense of losing this norm has been constant throughout literature, though it seems very acute now, and there are even theories (post-structural ones) trying to show that it doesn\u2019t exist, or no longer exists.\u00a0 Television has helped to do that, too.<\/p>\n

[497]\u00a0 The morals of Five, mainly, are the autonomy of the verbal universe, the expansion of time, and the business about reversing the \u201cmerely symbolic\u201d business in that Dante commentary.\u00a0 But there\u2019s also that higher kerygma business, which is a reversal of Otto\u2019s holiness, the mysterium tremendum<\/em>, which is basically an alienation image.\u00a0 The m. t. is connected with some form of Lacan\u2019s nom du P\u00e9re<\/em>, and with my \u201ctrickster\u201d passage indicating that you can\u2019t get to God through uniformity alone.<\/p>\n

[545]\u00a0 I\u2019d like to get rid of the blocking metaphors about the burden of the past, maintaining standards, keeping up traditions, & other euphemisms for staggering under guilt feelings.\u00a0 This again connects with my use of the Bible.\u00a0 In its historical & ideological context the Bible is male-centered, white-centered, Christian-centered, theist-centered.\u00a0 In its mythical & metaphorical contexts these limitations become metaphors for something that includes what they exclude.\u00a0 Perhaps the centres carry the predominant emphasis in the culture of the past: as Newman said of English literature, the bulk of it will always have been Protestant.\u00a0 One has to recreate.\u00a0 That\u2019s why, of course, there\u2019s so much yapping about deconstruction and, more especially, \u201csupplements.\u201d\u00a0 The real supplements are implied in the text, not in the psychology of the writer.<\/p>\n

[547]\u00a0 The interchange of whole and part I\u2019ve mentioned is an extension of what is called in criticism the hermeneutic circle.\u00a0 How do we understand the wholeness of a work of art?\u00a0 By studying the parts.\u00a0 But how do we understand the significance of the parts?\u00a0 By studying the whole.\u00a0 There is a vogue now for deprecating holism, but it is an indispensable metaphor: if we want education we also want a \u201cuniversity,\u201d despite the miscellany of activities; if we look at the stars, we want to feel that we live in a \u201cuniverse,\u201d despite the discouraging number of galaxies.\u00a0 Apart from that, \u201cwe are all members of one body\u201d is the extension of holism from literature into life.\u00a0 There can be no sense of exhilaration, no expansion of the spirit, without wholeness.<\/p>\n

[549]\u00a0 When I started criticism I knew that there was a difference between \u201ccreation\u201d and criticism because I myself was neither a poet nor a novelist.\u00a0 I knew that I was just as \u201ccreative\u201d as though I were, but I worried then, as was appropriate for the time, that criticism was regarded as parasitic.\u00a0 Now the perspective has reversed, like one of those trick drawings, and now, in the phrasing above, the poet must die that the critic may live.\u00a0 Criticism\u2019s paradoxical task is to indicate the boundaries of literature by obliterating them, just as one may indicate the existence of Russian literature to English readers by translating Tolstoy into English.<\/p>\n

[552]\u00a0 Marxist & feminist criticism belong in Seven, with the return of the excluded.\u00a0 As one can\u2019t alter a ruling-class or patriarchal past, one has to talk about a future, talk up the few bits of proletarian or feminist imagination in the past, or put the heroic stature on the consciousness-raising critic.\u00a0 All these are crap, more or less.\u00a0 But I mustn\u2019t get too psychological or Tibetan-monkish, at the end of Four or anywhere else.\u00a0 Kerygma is also\u2013\u2013perhaps primarily\u2013\u2013a social<\/em> vision, an attempt to see a society freed from ideology.\u00a0 Gibbon was, from a naive point of view, chasing a ghost, at best a metaphor inscribed within his sources, there being nothing \u201cout there\u201d that actually declined and fell.\u00a0 (My classing history with description of external events is impossibly naive, history being a discourse; but the descriptive is an element in history.)\u00a0 The present vogue for \u201chistoricity\u201d extends the conception of horizontal narrative into everything: the great importance of the axial perspective is that it shows the relativity of the historical.<\/p>\n

[556]\u00a0 Marxism shows an odd resemblance to Aristotleianism in earlier centuries.\u00a0 In the sixteenth century & later Aristotle became an influence on literary criticism precisely when he began to lose his dictatorship in logic, metaphysics, and psychology (De Anima).\u00a0 Marxism is a literary influence in non-Marxist countries just when it\u2019s on the skids as an economic theory in Marxist countries.<\/p>\n

[559]\u00a0 Derrida says structuralism is wrong because you can\u2019t get outside a structure to examine it.\u00a0 That\u2019s a misleading metaphor: you enter a structure from the \u201cinside\u201d & it becomes a part of you.\u00a0 Only it doesn\u2019t stop at the individual, but creates a spiritual substance: it\u2019s one\u2019s infinite extension.<\/p>\n

[566]\u00a0 Intro: much criticism today is in the tradition of the worst ages of Biblical commentary, except that its allegorical basis is feminist psychology or Marxist sociology rather than theology.<\/p>\n

[576]\u00a0 Seven: revolutionary criticism, whether Marxist, Freudian or feminist, seems to have to go through a stage of second-rate pedantry where it is intelligible only to fellow-believers, before it outgrows a quixotic phase of trying to remake history (that\u2019s wrong: Quixote wanted to continue what was there).\u00a0 As Newman said of English literature, \u201cit will always have been Protestant\u201d, and the real critical enterprise can hardly be concerned only, or primarily, with what we do from now on.\u00a0 Incidentally, doubles can be expanded: I don\u2019t know if I mentioned the second sharer in Conrad, but I ought to expand the TN [Twelfth Night<\/em>]-S\u00e9raphita point to include a reference to feminist criticism and my difficulties with Jung\u2019s anima<\/em>.<\/p>\n

[580]\u00a0 I can\u2019t say what I really think here: I\u2019d kill the book if I did.\u00a0 I think social feminism, genuine social & intellectual equality between men & women, a centrally important issue.\u00a0 Feminist literary<\/em> criticism is mostly heifer-shit.\u00a0 Women frustrated by the lack of outlet for their abilities turn to pedantic nagging, and the nagging pedantry of most feminist writing is a reflection of frustration unaccompanied by any vision of transcending it.\u00a0 As Newman resignedly said of English literature, it will always have been Protestant.\u00a0 Perhaps female (not feminist) writing has a great future, but that doesn\u2019t make its effort to rewrite the past any less futile.<\/p>\n

[622]\u00a0 When feminists are told that their criticism is infantile they always reply that of course new ideas are deeply disturbing.\u00a0 Their ideas are not new: they\u2019re<\/em> new.<\/p>\n

[654]\u00a0 I suppose a central question, in One, which I ducked, is: what mode does criticism itself belong to?\u00a0 It\u2019s the activity, I think, that inter-relates the modes and demonstrates their mutual interdependence.\u00a0 Literary<\/em> criticism, in my approach to it anyway, has the specific task of inter-relating the imaginative to the other three.\u00a0 Distinguishing without dividing, the critic separates mythology from ideology, concrete metaphor from abstract argument, self-contained language from servomechanistic description.<\/p>\n

[719]\u00a0 I\u2019ve already said, in prefaces & the like, that I\u2019d greatly prefer to see the occasion preserved: the lyric conference introduction is a good example.\u00a0 As a paper contributed to the conference, it looks rather silly, to me anyway.\u00a0 Naturally, I\u2019ve had some resounding flops.\u00a0 I\u2019m also particularly good, or used to be, at answering questions: my ability to translate a dumb question into a searching one has often been commented on.\u00a0 This should be leading to something useful, but it hasn\u2019t yet.\u00a0 The central thing is that my \u201ccreative\u201d faculty is the power of personalizing<\/em> occasions.\u00a0 My written texts are, whatever Derrida says, incarnational or prophetic, and reading them ought to lead to reincarnating them.<\/p>\n

[732]\u00a0 I may have this too: re the Paul de Man scandal: why should we expect public figures to be role models, exuding all the approved sentiments?\u00a0 His record could hardly be worse than Heidegger\u2019s, but who denies Heidegger\u2019s importance?\u00a0 Heidegger, Frege, Spengler, George, even Wagner: all people of great importance: every one a kraut chunkhead as dumb as the beer barrels in Munich.\u00a0 Jung too, for all his dodging.\u00a0 Sartre: the incarnation of the trahison des clercs<\/em>, the juvenile delinquent of the intellect.\u00a0 Camus used to complain of being taken as a moral oracle, but that was just the public saying: \u201cSartre and Camus\u2013\u2013well, at least Camus is a grown man.\u201d<\/p>\n

DERRIDA<\/p>\n

From Notebooks 91398.a<\/p>\n

[8]\u00a0 Derrida\u2019s logocentric text is a straw man, or rather a cloth-bound man: the real logocentric text is the dogma, the logos that\u2019s opaque, intolerant, and malignant.\u00a0 The Logos of John is a use of the word in a greatly extended and more flexible context (coinciding ultimately with mythos): the traditional translation \u201cverbum,\u201d which logos never means in Greek, expresses something of this.\u00a0 From Heraclitus to Philo logos means a rational principle within nature: the logoi spermatikoi of the Stoics are something else again, but they aren\u2019t anything corresponding to the diffusion of spiritual energy, at once divine and human, that is meant by logos as verbum.<\/p>\n

[161]\u00a0 History redeems: there\u2019s a process within history that isn\u2019t at all what Marxism calls the historical process, but relates to the cultural tradition.\u00a0 People denounced or martyred as horrible heretics in the hysteria of their times later become objects of great cultural interest.\u00a0 The twenty-first century will find The Satanic Verses a document of great interest to scholars and critics, but the Ayatollah will be of no interest to anybody except as one more nightmare of bigotry that history has produced in such profusion.\u00a0 One would hope that eventually the stupid human race would get the point.\u00a0 God doesn\u2019t create post-mortem hells even for people devoting their lives to cruelty and tyranny, but if he did the Ayatollah would certainly be howling in one of them forever.\u00a0 Anyway, this historical redemption of culture is something Schelling meant by theogony, except that he couldn\u2019t get beyond the purely mythological stage into literature.\u00a0 Geoffrey Hartman says Derrida has proved that there are no incarnational texts, Hartman and Derrida both being Jews: actually, there can be no text that isn\u2019t incarnational, that doesn\u2019t represent the descent of kerygma into flesh.\u00a0 Except that, while all writers and artists are prophets of a sort, most of them are opaque prophets, not vehicles of kerygma except by accident.<\/p>\n

[167]\u00a0 The Old Testament begins with pure myth, creation and flood stories and the like; then it gradually begins to absorb history, the historical element becoming progressively more visible as it goes on.\u00a0 In the N.T. we start with the Gospels which are presented mythically, then we have Acts, which shows myth organizing history again.\u00a0 Derrida\u2019s remark that myth or narrative is insane is quite consistent with what I\u2019m saying.\u00a0 Rhetoric lies about history; kerygma overrides it.<\/p>\n

[175]\u00a0 Derrida on the book between two covers as a solid object enclosing an authority is, as Derrida must know, complete bullshit: nobody believes that a book is an object: it\u2019s a focus of verbal energy.\u00a0 What he should be attacking is the dogmatic formulation that eliminates its own opposite: that\u2019s the symbol or metaphor that can kill a man, and has killed thousands.\u00a0 It\u2019s always self-enclosed and opaque; no kerygma ever gets through it.<\/p>\n

[186]\u00a0 Everything is everywhere at once, but it also has to be where it is.\u00a0 The biographical sequence I just noted is recapitulated in the sequence of every word and syllable within the individual text.\u00a0 This is a most frightful tyranny to the bateau ivre deconstructions of Derrida-ism, but is the necessary complement to them.<\/p>\n

From Notebook 1993.2-6<\/p>\n

[23]\u00a0 The text is the presence.\u00a0 I know this sounds a little like \u201cthe medium is the message,\u201d but at least it gets over the Derrida hurdle of a written word deferring to an oral word deferring to a pre-verbal situation of events.<\/p>\n

[113]\u00a0 Maybe my phrase about traces of processes in GC [The Great Code<\/em>] was profounder than I realized.\u00a0 The word \u201cGod\u201d in the Bible in a sense is a trace of a process, partly in Derrida\u2019s sense of the word \u201ctrace.\u201d\u00a0 So the work of God is Heilsgeschichte, or Providence, where no design ever reveals itself beyond an occasional possible insight.<\/p>\n

[220]\u00a0 I\u2019m still playing around with the idea that my eight stages of the Bible break into four epiphanies of the Word and four responses of the Spirit.\u00a0 The first epiphany of the Word is creation, the manifesting of physical nature, the postulating of Heidegger\u2019s problem of why there are things rather than nothing.\u00a0 The second epiphany is that of law, which is peculiarly the epiphany of man as not merely a perceiving but a reflecting being: it completes the activity of consciousness which creation begins.\u00a0 The third epiphany is that of prophecy, which is where Judaism (Moses) and Islam (Elijah) still are.\u00a0 For Christianity, Jesus is the manifesting of the pure individual in the midst of society, though still a historical presence pointed to by the words of the New Testament, hence still part of Derrida\u2019s \u201cmetaphysics of presence.\u201d\u00a0 I think the primary or panoramic apocalypse is involved in this too, except for the prominence of the sealed scroll and its opening, which points in the direction of the total identity of Word of God as book with Word of God as presence.<\/p>\n

[278]\u00a0 I got the self-alienated moi from Lacan\u2013\u2013the escape from Narcissus is, I think, a major theme of the second part.\u00a0 I wish I knew what the opposite of logocentric was\u2013\u2013apart, that is, from whatever Derrida writes and scratches out again.\u00a0 Well, I can leave that.\u00a0 To know as we are now known: that\u2019s Paul on the spiritual awakening from the logocentric knower.<\/p>\n

[283]\u00a0 4.\u00a0 Concern, mythology, language as metaphor, interpenetration, and whatever the hell Derrida means by differential language, if anything: so far everything seems to be logocentric except what Derrida writes and scratches out again.<\/p>\n

[450]\u00a0 The development of linguistics into semiotics, from Saussure to Derrida and others, is based on the concept of difference.\u00a0 A word is a signifier arbitrarily related to a signified; it has meaning because it is different from other words.\u00a0 Nobody can challenge such postulates; but I think metaphor provides an identity beyond difference, a construction beyond deconstruction.\u00a0 In metaphor the statement \u201cA is B,\u201d being usually absurd on the face of it, carries with it the implication \u201cA is not B, and nobody but a fool would imagine that it was.\u201d This latter implication is the basis of the present linguistic development.\u00a0 The assertion itself is made in order to open up a current of energy between subject and object: from the point of view of the denial, metaphor can never achieve anything except hypothesis.\u00a0 I got this far in the Anatomy, and am now trying to see how further I call get with the Bible, which is metaphorical and yet is clearly concerned with something other than hypothesis.<\/p>\n

[495]\u00a0 In any case what does belong is a recapitulation of the seven\/eight stages of Biblical revelation, and a division of them into four epiphanies of the Word and the four responses of the Spirit.\u00a0 The principle stated in GC [The Great Code<\/em>] that \u201cWord of God\u201d suggests an identification of the Bible with the presence of Christ, there being no series of antecedent events that have priority over the verbal ones.\u00a0 Hence Derrida\u2019s \u201cmetaphysic of presence,\u201d the written word deferring to the spoken one and that again to the pre-verbal situation, doesn\u2019t apply.<\/p>\n

[569]\u00a0 In poetry, whatever Derrida may say, the oral takes precedence over the written, because poetry is being referred back to an original performance.\u00a0 The personal poet has to be represented by somebody, however remote from tee poet or however silent.\u00a0 But, of course, the poem is not a direct address, but broadcast like a radio program.<\/p>\n

[577]\u00a0 This chapter looks as though it were going to be on the logocentric universe, and the hell with Derrida.\u00a0 On the other hand \u201cdeconstructive\u201d perspectives may enter the next three chapters.<\/p>\n

[614]\u00a0 Criticism (Stanley Fish) is the act of community response to a text.\u00a0 I still think Derrida is making far too much of what\u2019s really just a convention, that the written words are being spoken by somebody.\u00a0 Of course it would be true that in oral discourse the words are unborn, attached to an enclosing presence; but the text is the presence.\u00a0 I think the analogy of the convention that a poem is sung rather than spoken goes a long way.<\/p>\n

[not yet numbered para.]\u00a0 This simultaneous apprehension of the whole work is both the origin of the conception of \u201cstructure\u201d (a spatial metaphor) and of all (I think) literary criticism can use of Derrida\u2019s ecriture.\u00a0 This ecriture precedes the narrative (which always carries with it some metaphor of speech), in the sense that it\u2019s the enfolded seed from which the narrative unfolds.\u00a0 The \u201cstructure\u201d metaphor of course doesn\u2019t imply that, if it\u2019s a major classic, we ever grasp the whole structure: that\u2019s a lifetime effort.<\/p>\n

[not yet numbered para.]\u00a0 (2) Art of words: emphasis on words connects literature with criticism, then both with everything else in words\u2013\u2013semiotics and linguistic developments.\u00a0 Such words are primarily written (Derrida): in oral discourse the words are still attached to an enclosing presence, and are hence, so to speak, unborn.<\/p>\n

[not yet numbered para.]\u00a0 Music and wind instrument conventions too.\u00a0 Note that Derrida\u2019s principle may apply to metaphysics, where the radical is supposed to be written, but not to literature.<\/p>\n

[not yet numbered para.]\u00a0 (3) Narrative movement vs, Gestalt: McLuhan left out the Gestalt ant the Derrida people leave out the movement.\u00a0 Convention of speaker in poetry, alternatively music: Epilogue to Lycidas.\u00a0 \u201cStructure\u201d a misleading metaphor whenever it assumes that total understanding of anything of any size in literature is ever possible.\u00a0 The reader is not all the other readers, most of whom are in a different time of history anyway, including the future.<\/p>\n

[not yet numbered para.]\u00a0 Chaotic tendency in criticism to move their neighbor\u2019s landmarks: use of criticism to undermine criticism more insidious than Derrida\u2019s writing-speaking business.<\/p>\n

Notebook 91284.j<\/p>\n

I have been interested in FW ever since it appeared\u2013\u2013I still have the copy I bought for ninety- eight cents on a remainder table in 1938\u2013\u2013and, like many other people, I still find it irresistibly fascinating.\u00a0 But for a long time I was puzzled about the conception of literature it suggests to a critic.\u00a0 I never really bought the \u201cdream language\u201d theory, even if Joyce himself did: agreed that the dream condenses and displaces and often puns, it doesn\u2019t produce that kind of language.<\/p>\n

But Derrida and the deconstruction school began to clear it up.\u00a0 Practically every word in FW contains, along with an often vestigial surface meaning, a large number of \u201csupplements.\u201d\u00a0 Also, Finnegan himself is the \u201ceffaced\u201d human archetype of whom HCE is the \u201ctrace.\u201d\u00a0 FW is really a gigantic effort to move into the \u201cdifferential\u201d sphere of language and out of the \u201clogocentric\u201d one.\u00a0 Deconstructionists approach every text as though it were a potential FW, or, perhaps more accurately, they approach texts as Joyce himself approached the first drafts of his \u201cWork in Progress.\u201d<\/p>\n

Who dream?\u00a0 I don\u2019t think that woman\u2019s book on the decentered universe, which implies that it doesn\u2019t matter who dreams, holds up: it\u2019s trendy, and certainly FW seems like a deconstructionist\u2019s paradise, with all things and events reduced to cryptic verbal allusions to them.\u00a0 But Joyce was \u201cold-fashioned.\u201d\u00a0 There are three dreams at least: one, the universal dream of human history,where the dreamer is F as HCE (they\u2019re both married to ALP, incidentally).\u00a0 Two, the dream of art which struggles against the dream of history by trying to interpret it: the Joseph-interpreter is Shem the Penman or Punman, Joyce himself.\u00a0 Three, the individual dream of a tavern-keeper of English origin in Chapelizod, whose name may be Porter, who has two sons, Jerry and Kevin, a daughter Isabel, two (at least) servants and twelve customer).\u00a0 All these are assimilated to their Jungian universal archetypes.<\/p>\n

LACAN<\/p>\n

Notebook 1993.2-6<\/p>\n

[158]\u00a0 The Eros chapter is gradually clearing a bit: Patai collaborated with Robert Graves on one book, and I\u2019m also rereading The White Goddess.\u00a0 A lot of it, as I knew before, is demonic: the female-will cycle that keeps the imagination embryonic and unborn.\u00a0 But the parody principle works here as elsewhere, and one can get to the black bride through her.\u00a0 Maybe I should explicitly use Blake\u2019s Lucy\u2013\u2013I don\u2019t know why I\u2019ve dropped it in the course.\u00a0 Pope\u2019s commentary on the Song of Songs keeps disgorging fascinating stuff about the number seven as the number of virginity (Philo), hence of the Sabbath as the virgin bride of Israel.\u00a0 The Jewish Sabbath begins at sundown on Friday, which is Venus\u2019 day: white goddess modulating into black bride.\u00a0 I\u2019m sure the Tempest masque and the exclusion of Venus from it are connected, what with the insistence on preserving Miranda\u2019s virginity. Lacan is wrong: it isn\u2019t just the phallus that\u2019s lost, but since the Fall every sexual union has had or been a screw loose.\u00a0 Yeats\u2019 poem on Solomon and the Queen of Sheba is the one to consult.<\/p>\n

[278]\u00a0 I got the self-alienated moi from Lacan\u2013\u2013the escape from Narcissus is, I think, a major theme of the second part.\u00a0 I wish I knew what the opposite of logocentric was\u2013\u2013apart, that is, from whatever Derrida writes and scratches out again.\u00a0 Well, I can leave that.\u00a0 To know as we are now known: that\u2019s Paul on the spiritual awakening from the logocentric knower.<\/p>\n

[420]\u00a0 3.\u00a0 That\u2019s clear: what isn\u2019t clear is the sequence of the next two chapters.\u00a0 I should think the psychological one, where parental obligation-figures dominate at first and finally the birth of the spirit-child forces them to combine into Lacan\u2019s moi or self-alienated ego, would be next.<\/p>\n

[428]\u00a0 3.\u00a0 Conflict of Authority and Autonomy.\u00a0 The soul-body hierarchy and its gradual displacement by a Spirit that begins as a child and grows until it forces the parental soul-body figures to consolidate into a self-alienated ego, Lacan\u2019s moi.<\/p>\n

[485]\u00a0 Also the discussion of the \u201cgospel\u201d section should be in part a discussion of canon: the notion of closed and open texts\u2013\u2013I glanced at this in the last chapter of GC [The Great Code<\/em>]\u2013\u2013and the whole process-incorporation of the imperfect.\u00a0 I suppose this begins with prophecy, where oral oracles are written down but not necessarily arranged\u2013\u2013the Q stage of the gospels.\u00a0 I suppose Lacan would say that there\u2019s a continuous verbal context for the oracular potentially present, which is certainly what I used to think myself and probably still do.<\/p>\n

[552]\u00a0 If the first chapter is on the word, in the sense of the logocentric universe, it\u2019s among other things on the birth of the Word.\u00a0 Hence the second chapter might well be on the birth of the Spirit.\u00a0 All I have on this is a hunch that we start with a sense of hierarchy and authority derived from the contemplation of nature and reinforced by parental figures.\u00a0 After a while the Spirit is born, which like the Word starts as a puer aeternus but forces the obligation or superego figures to combine into Lacan\u2019s moi or self-alienated ego.<\/p>\n

[593]\u00a0 The spirit grows and grows and grows, and proportionately as it does so everything that isn\u2019t spirit shrinks into a self-alienated ego, Lacan\u2019s moi.\u00a0 This moi is the \u201clost soul\u201d that everybody has and ought to get rid of.<\/p>\n

FOCAULT<\/p>\n

[263]\u00a0 Vico\u2019s ricorso, Spengler\u2019s organic culture, Yeats\u2019s double gyre, Wells\u2019s onward and upward from primeval slime to cocksure cockney, the Marxist historical process, Tolstoy\u2019s chaos view: all these are metahistorical constructs.\u00a0 Find that sentence in Foucault about the past lost paradise versus whatever the future one is.\u00a0 Nietzsche\u2019s identical recurrence, derived partly from Virgil and echoed by Shelley.\u00a0 God, what a lot of horseshit.\u00a0 The panhistorical fantasies of Hegel, Marx, and Newman.\u00a0 The horizontal vision alone is never enough, and the statement \u201cI believe only in history\u201d is as asinine a pronouncement as any conscious mind can get past its teeth.\u00a0 Only the vertical vision, even if it\u2019s some impossible apocalyptic dream of the end of history as we know it, gives any dignity or integrity to human life.<\/p>\n

[265]\u00a0 \u201cThe great dream of an end to History is the utopia of causal systems of thought, just as the dream of the world\u2019s beginnings was the utopia of classifying systems of thought.\u201d\u00a0 Foucault, The Order of Things, 263.<\/p>\n

DECONSTRUCTION<\/p>\n

From Notebook 91283.n<\/p>\n

[39]\u00a0 If we look at some of the stories in Tristram Shandy\u2013\u2013the man who dropped a hot chestnut into his open fly, the abbess and novice using obscene words to move a pair of balky mules, etc., we say that the stories are nothing: Sterne seems to be making a point of this.\u00a0 In the common phrase, there is style but no substance.\u00a0 The trouble is that this is a false antithesis: style-itself is substantial.\u00a0 I noticed this absorption of everything into rhetorical patterns in Alan of Lille in medieval times, and it recurs in Sterne.\u00a0 The link with the age of sensibility may be that there\u2019s nothing there but the quivering of words: using words for doing other things doesn\u2019t get in.\u00a0 So he\u2019s a deconstruction pioneer, or at least a formalist one.<\/p>\n

From Notebook 1993.2-6<\/p>\n

[415]\u00a0 And, of course, you\u2019ll eventually have to pull the whole god-damned verbal universe in, in the trail of literature as verbal.\u00a0 \u201cStructure,\u201d being a metaphor from architecture, eventually has to be discarded, along with the \u201cdeconstruction\u201d which is part of its fallacy.<\/p>\n

[563]\u00a0 So a fourth chapter might have to deal with something like the intervention of the Father.\u00a0 This seems involved in the emphasis that Jesus gives to the Father in his teaching, and it seems to have something to do especially with the inspiration of the prophet and with the great breakthrough in the Book of Job.<\/p>\n

[564]\u00a0 I have a notion that \u201cdeconstruction\u201d is involved in this intervention of the Father, but I don\u2019t yet know how.\u00a0 Moses on Pisgah, being buried apparently by God himself, seeing but not entering the Promised Land, and thus being the only person who really saw it, all Joshua saw being the historical Canaan.\u00a0 Elijah on Carmel proving that Baal was the true god, because no real god goes jumping around on cue doing stunts.\u00a0 This episode is a type of the intervention at the end of Job, where God really does descend to the altar and kindle a flame there.\u00a0 Isaiah and Ezekiel, of course\u2013\u2013their visions, I mean.<\/p>\n

[567]\u00a0 Perhaps it isn\u2019t the Father but the Spirit that deconstructs the Word.\u00a0 That is, the Word by itself creates the ontological hierarchy reflected in traditional conceptions of creation (the primacy of the identified thing), law (the primacy of the order), and prophecy (the primacy of the uttering presence).<\/p>\n

[613]\u00a0 \u201cDeconstruction\u201d is actually the analyzing of the ideological content in order to get down to the underlying myth.\u00a0 Notice how stories with a strong narrative (mythical) interest are placed like buried treasure, told by someone else or discovered among old papers.<\/p>\n

[not yet numbered para.]\u00a0 Chain of being lingered to the eighteenth century, though Voltaire was suspicious of the echelle de l\u2019infini.\u00a0 Series of \u201cdeconstructions\u201d of the ladder image in Eliot, Pound, Joyce and Yeats.\u00a0 Beddoes on the devil as the self.<\/p>\n

[not yet numbered para.]\u00a0 Underside of what\u2019s presented in Henry V: the only \u201cdeconstruction\u201d I\u2019m much interested in is the reading of the whole play so as to bring out the underthought of disaster to both France and England as well as the overthought of simple-minded patriotic play.<\/p>\n

Notebook 91284.x<\/p>\n

[4]\u00a0 I\u2019d like to figure out what the hell deconstruction is, and if it\u2019s what I think it is, explain why the opposite procedure of reconstructing the mythical universe is the critic\u2019s primary job.\u00a0 This universe wouldn\u2019t be the \u201creal\u201d or external world, naturally: like Stevens, I understand that reality and realism are at opposite poles.\u00a0 From the metaphorical point of view all \u201crealism\u201d is a neurotic projection, a fantastic identification of something \u201cwithin\u201d with something \u201cwithout,\u201d except that these words dont\u2019 apply.\u00a0 The externalized world is the reflection of Narcissus, where he\u2019s still not sure whether he\u2019s subject or object: the world of poetry is the world of the real Narcissus who\u2019s outgrown projection.\u00a0 The last enemy to be destroyed is the metaphor of \u201cwithin.\u201d\u00a0 Reality is not subjective, of course; but neither is it a subject grown obejective to itself.<\/p>\n

Notebook 91284.aa<\/p>\n

[5]\u00a0 My function as a critic right now is to reverse the whole \u201cdeconstruction\u201d procedure, which leads eventually to the total extinction of both literature and criticism: people are naturally attracted first, and most, by the suicidal and destructive.\u00a0 One should turn around to a reconstruction, which is a matter of seeing a narrative in its undisplaced form as a single complex metaphor.<\/p>\n

Notebook 91284.dd<\/p>\n

Paul de Man<\/p>\n

[1]\u00a0 The Kleist essay is saying one of the things the Yeats essay should have said: Sailing to Byzantium is a distance-view of the holy city, so it looks aesthetic, so damn aesthetic that nothing \u201cnatural\u201d is left of it.\u00a0 But when you get to its interior and participate in the process maintaining it, as you do in Byzantium, there\u2019s a fair amount of fury and mire about: in other words, the aesthetic is seen to be operated by violence at closer quarters.<\/p>\n

[2]\u00a0 Even Eliot: \u201cwhere you must move in measure like a dancer\u201d is said in the context of a ghost in the bombed-out streets of London intended to recall Dante\u2019s hell.<\/p>\n

[3]\u00a0 Sade\u2019s nature and Wordsworth\u2019s nature; Eros and Thanatos, or rather, sublimating Eros according to Freud and going toward Thanatos.<\/p>\n

[4]\u00a0 I\u2019m pretty sure that 18th c. Classicism was a structure of allegory based on authoritarian violence and that de Man knows it, but I haven\u2019t got the words for it yet.<\/p>\n

[5]\u00a0 Allegory is imagination in words dominated by ideology, whether doctrinal or realistic.\u00a0 Romanticism brought in, I think, the essential feature of a conflict<\/em> of ideologies, hence its deconstructions of Jacob\u2019s ladder.\u00a0 The common ground for the conflict had to be the existential personality first (in this period) isolated by Rousseau\u2013\u2013I can buy that much about him.<\/p>\n

[6]\u00a0 Blindness and Insight seems to be, and certainly has the reputation of being, a book about all the thing words can\u2019t and shouldn\u2019t be expected to do, a ceaseless driving around an oriental city one-way streets and unmarked dead ends.\u00a0 Some traditional things are kept, such as rhetoric as a combination of persuasion and figuration, but not only to show that it doesn\u2019t persuade or much figure.<\/p>\n

[7]\u00a0 As we shall not have any more books by Paul de Man, it is all the more essential to say that \u201cThe Rhetoric of Romanticism\u201d is far better book than its author says it is.\u00a0 (I think the historical diachronicity actually does work out.)<\/p>\n

[8]\u00a0 Of all the many verses in the Bible that seem designed to drive the attentive reader out of his mind, one is Genesis 3:19, which says that God brought every beast and bird to the adam \u201cto see what he would call them\u201d.\u00a0 The naming process is obviously a part of creation; but why is curiosity of the reality of metaphor.<\/p>\n

[9]\u00a0 He begins with Holderlin as expressing a nostalgia for a state of things in which words \u201cwie Blumen entstehen\u201d: in other words a mythological world where the gods have recovered for human experience the reality of metaphor.<\/p>\n

[10]\u00a0 I haven\u2019t yet quite figured out what he\u2019s saying about Mallarme: seems to me Mallarme felt that only consciousness stood between human and natural identity and spontaneity, hence the central figure of the epic he wanted to write was the decapitated St. John.<\/p>\n

[11]\u00a0 The people who are making careers out of saying that other critical theorists are this and that say that de Man is magisterial and know-it-all, on account he does know something.\u00a0 I think (subject to rechecking) the blindness and insight thesis itself is dubious: it\u2019s really saying that Derrida gives us a skewed reading of Rousseau (blindness) to clarify his own views (insight).<\/p>\n

[12]\u00a0 But in this book the magisterial quality comes quite legitimately from craftsmanship.\u00a0 He reads the very difficult and elusive passage on Rousseau in Holderlin\u2019s \u201cDer Rhen\u201d with just a little more care and patience than the last (or probably the next) critic, and so which, by implication we all ought to be seeing.<\/p>\n

[13]\u00a0 Similarly, in the lyric and modernity essay in BI [Blindness and Insight<\/em>], he picks up some facile twaddle about the obscurity of modern poets and how Mallarme retreated from representation altogether, and shows by a beautiful exposition of the \u201cTombeau de Verlaine\u201d poem that Mallarme did nothing of the kind, even though his representational imagery was many-layered, \u201cpli\u201d being one of his favorite terms.<\/p>\n

See also Frye\u2019s paper, \u201cLacan and the Full Word\u201d and his review of de Man\u2019s The Rhetoric of Romanticism<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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