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Jonathan Culler

It seems thoroughly appropriate for a conference on Deconstruction in America to begin with literature, since literature—the study thereof—is where deconstruction in America itself began to take root. But one might also suspect that, if we lead off with literature, it is in order to get it out of the way and to get down to the important stuff—philosophy and politics. Crucial in a sense, yet perhaps inconsequential, there to be passed beyond—is that of the condition or the fate, shall we say, of literature today?

My subject is that combination of importance and inconsequentiality known as the lyric—which for me at least is the most economical if not quintessential instantiation of literature.

Jacques Derrida has always written about authors deemed literary but recently he has dealt more frequently with the idea of literature itself. For example, he speaks of literature as

[an] historical institution with its conventions, rules, etc., but also this institution of fiction which gives in principle the power to say everything, to break free of the rules, to displace them, and thereby to Institute, to invent and even to suspect the traditional difference between nature and institution … The institution of literature in the West, in its relatively modern form, is linked to an authorization to say everything and doubtless too to the coming about of the modern idea of democracy. Not that it depends on a democracy in place, but it seems inseparable to me from what calls forth a democracy, in the most open (and doubtless itself to come) sense of democracy.¹

Here is another passage from the same text; an interview with Derek Attridge in Acts of Literature (1992):

This experience of writing is “subject” to an imperative: to give space for singular events, to invent something new in the form of acts of writing which no longer consist in a theoretical knowledge, in new constative statements, to give oneself to a poetico-literary performativity at least analogous to that of promises, orders, or acts of constitution or legislation which do not only change language, or which, in changing more than language, change more than language. ... In order for this singular performativity to be effective, for something new to be produced, historical competence is not indispensable in a certain form (that of a certain academic kind of knowledge, for example, on the subject of literary history), but it increases the chances.²

Or again, Derrida remarks that deconstruction, in this historical moment, is crucially conditioned by “l’événement de la littérature depuis trois siècles, en tant que système de possibilités performatives. Elles ont accompagnées la forme moderne de la démocratie. Les constitutions politiques ont un régime discursif identique à la constitution des structures littéraires” [“the event of literature for the past three centuries, as a system of performative possibilities. They have accompanied the modern form of democracy. Political constitutions have a discursive regime identical to that of the constitution of literary structures.”]³

Finally, here is a passage from “Passions: ‘An Oblique Offering,’ ” which recapitulates with a difference:

Literature is a modern invention, inscribed in conventions and institutions which, to hold on to just this trait, secures in principle its right to say everything. Literature thus ties its destiny to a certain non-censure, to the space of democratic freedom. No democracy without literature; no literature without democracy. It is always possible to want neither one nor the other, and there is no shortage of doing without them under all regimes, … But in no case can one dissociate one from the other. No analysis would be equal to it. … The possibility of literature, the legitimation that a society gives it, the allaying of suspicion or terror with regard to it, all that goes together—politically—with the unlimited right to ask any question, to suspect all dogmatism, to analyze every presupposition, even those of the ethics or the politics of responsibility.⁴

Thinking about literature thus seems directed to work eventually to elucidate a certain relation between literature and democracy: is it a metonymical relationship (where literature is linked to what gives rise to democracy), or a metaphorical relation (where literature’s performativity is at least analogous to that of acts of constitution), or a relation of identity of discursive regimes, or a relation of mutual entailment (you can’t have one without the other)?

The relationship as sketched here seems based on two interrelated factors—two factors which bring together the modern ideas or institutions of literature and democracy: first, a freedom which involves a special kind of responsibility, a hyper-responsibility, which includes a right to absolute nonresponse. The writer, like the citizen, must, Derrida writes, “sometimes demand a certain irresponsibility, at least as regards ideological powers … This duty of irresponsibility, of refusing to reply for one’s thought or writing to constituted powers, is perhaps the highest form of responsibility.”⁵ There are important questions to be pursued in this domain, apropos both literature and democracy and the freedom and responsibility they involve; but the wager is that these questions will more likely be elucidated if, as they are pursued, the cases of literature and democracy are kept in view together.

The second connecting factor in these passages is the performativity of literature and of the discursive regimes of politics, both of whose discourses work to bring into being the situations they purport to describe. Since appeal to the notion of performativity has become very widespread of late, as the success of Judith Butler’s brilliant Gender Trouble has led people in gender studies and queer theory to take up the notion, it is important to stress that performativity is the name of a problem rather than a solution, that it draws attention to the difficulty of determining what can be said to happen, under what conditions, and to the fact that the event is not something that is simply given. Once again, it is the conjunction of literature and politics through the notion of performativity that gives the complexity of the problem a chance of being elucidated.

But the idea of literature that emerges from such deconstruc-tive reflections on the relation of literature and democracy is not itself my subject, though I hope we may have the opportunity to pursue it. In discussions of the sort I have been quoting, Derrida distinguishes between literature—this modern institution, with its possibility of tout dire—and something else: poetry (or some times belles lettres). And so it is in this context, where literature is linked with democracy and described in terms of a certain hyper responsibility and a performativity of the word, that I want to ask about poetry, particularly the lyric. To put the problem most simply, if we can maintain “no democracy without literature,” it seems considerably harder to imagine claiming, “no democracy without poetry,” or vice versa. What, then, can we say of lyric? What is its relation to the freedom and the performativity that are crucial to the modern idea of literature?

Northrop Frye defines the lyric as utterance overheard, a notion Paul de Man partly takes up in calling it “the instance of represented voice.”⁶ In an essay on Théodore de Banville, Baudelaire writes of the lyric, “Constatons que l’hyperbole et l’apostrophe sont des formes du language qui lui sont non seulement des plus agréables mais aussi des plus nécessaires … ” [Note that hyperbole and apostrophe are the forms of language which are not only the most agreeable but also the most necessary to it].⁷ And it is in this tradition that de Man, Barbara Johnson, and I have argued that the fundamental tropes of lyric are apostrophe (the address to something that is not an empirical listener) and prosopopoeia (the giving of face and voice to and thus the animation of what would not otherwise be a living interlocutor).⁸ Both apostrophe and prosopopoeia work to create I-you relations and structures of specularity, which seem characteristic of the dramas projected by lyric. Whether we think of the address to apparently inanimate objects—”O Rose thou art Sick!” “O wild West Wind!” “Sois sage, o ma douleur!”—or the address to the beloved, apostrophes are not only endemic in lyric, they are the moments chosen for satirizing poetic discourse, as in, for example,

O Huncamunca, Huncamunca, O!

Thy pouting breasts, like kettledrums of brass,

Beat everlasting loud alarms of joy, . . .

For what’s too high for love, or what’s too low?

O Huncamunca, Huncamunca, O! ”⁹

Now apostrophes, whatever they are invoking, seem to end up posing, explicitly or implicitly, questions about the performative efficacy of poetic rhetoric itself. So as Baudelaire’s “Ciel Brouillé” concludes,

O femme dangereuse, O séduisants climats!

Adorerai-je aussi ta neige et vos frimas,

Et saurai-je tirer de l’implacable hiver

Des plaisirs plus aigus que la glace et le fer?

[O dangerous woman, o seductive climates!

Will I also adore your snow and ice,

And will I be able to draw from implacable winter

Pleasures that are sharper than ice and steel?]¹⁰

This is a question about the performativity of lyrical discourse: will it work? will it bring about the conditions it describes? To take a more familiar example, Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” insistently invokes and conjures the wind in the apparent hope that it will, in the end, be what the speaker demands:

Be thou, spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!¹¹

In concluding, the speaker urges the wind to “Be through my lips to unawakened earth/The trumpet of a prophecy”—a prophecy which consists of the incantation of these verses asking the wind to bear, sustain, repeat, proliferate a poetic enunciation or performance whose content is this performance itself; namely, the articulation of the hope that the natural cycle of the seasons (“If winter comes, can spring be far behind!”) will, through the agency of the wind, animate the speaker’s voice. That is, the speaker urges the wind to “be through my lips the trumpet of a prophecy,” but there is here no other prophecy than this hopeful calling on the wind to advance the poetic voice.

When lyrics thematically pose the question of the performative power of lyric rhetoric, it is often in this form: will you be as I describe you when I invoke you? will you be what I say you are? And when they do appear to answer the question, it is often by finding some way of formulating the request so that it is by definition fulfilled if we hear it. If one takes such cases as exemplary of the performativity of lyric, then one would see lyric, in principle and often in practice as well, as a poetic naming that performatively creates what it names. So poems that invoke the heart—“O mon coeur, entend le chant des matelots” or “Be still, my heart”—create what we have come to call “the heart.”

This locating of lyric value in performativity is, perhaps, the contemporary deconstructive version of Heidegger’s poetic aletheia, poetry as the happening of truth at work. But there are lots of lyric examples which make one uncomfortable with such a claim, where the operations of apostrophe and prosopopoeia create not the heart but speaking birds, animated sofas, or daggers full of charm: “Charmant poignard, jaillis de ton étui.” Indeed, Heidegger emphatically moves to separate his true dichtung from frivolous play of the imagination—the sort of play that seems most at work in apostrophic lyrics, which animate all kinds of things in ways that frequently seem embarrassing.¹² If one focuses on the performative functioning of a lyric conceived as fundamentally apostrophic and prosopopoeic, then it seems overweening to link these figures, which so often foreground a conspicuously bizarre or arbitrary figurality, to the happening of truth.

What happens through the performativity of lyric is exceedingly difficult to say, but whether or not lyric is the happening of truth it does seem to happen as singular concatenations of words—“Shivelights and shadowtackle in long lashes lace, lance, and pair”¹³—combinations difficult to reduce to theme or to infer from particular empirical situations. The happening of lyrics is linked to a strangeness or alterity which, if it works, may lodge itself in memory. If the lyric happens, it does so as a form of radical singularity whose value is linked to a certain memorable otherness. So, if the “Ode to the West Wind” has in any sense made the wind be come the spirit of the speaker—”Be thou me, impetuous one”—it is because this verbal connection has been inscribed in memories here and there, has proliferated in its iterability.

Educational tradition, from Plato to the present, has distinguished good memory from bad—the memory of understanding or assimilation (which is to be encouraged and which is what tests should test), from the memory of rote repetition or mere memorization. On the one hand there is what you have made your own and can recall, reformulate, and produce as knowledge because you have understood it; on the other, there is what you repeat without necessarily understanding, what remains lodged within mechanical memory (Gedächtnis) as a piece of otherness. Now if the novel is writing you assimilate—that is, when you remember novels you recall, in your own words, as we say, what happens, what they are about—lyrics, on the contrary, retain an irreducible otherness: to remember them at all is to remember at least some of their words; they ask as Derrida puts it in “Che cos’è la poesia?” to be learned by heart. “Le poétique, disons-le, serait ce que tu désires apprendre, mais de l’autre, grâce à l’autre et sous sa dictée, par coeur: imparare a memoria.” [“The poetic, let us say it, would be that which you desire to learn, but from the other, thanks to the other, and at his or her dictation, by heart: to learn by heart.”]¹⁴ This brief text of Derrida’s takes as the figure for the lyric not the phoenix nor the eagle but the modest, prickly yet pathetic hedgehog, l’hérisson. Neither héritier nor nourisson, l’hérisson is a creature which, as in Giraudoux’s Electre, “se fait écraser”—indeed, whose nature is to “se faire écraser sur les routes.”¹⁵ The poem is addressed to you—a generalized, fictional you which it posits, which it tries to create—but it can always miss its mark, can be ignored, even ridiculed. It exposes itself to being dismissed. So, while at one level, lyrics thematize the problem of whether they will make things happen and sometimes find ways of insuring that what they want to have happen does happen through the form of articulation of the desire, their performativity consists also in their success in creating the listeners/readers they attempt to address and in making themselves remembered.

On the question of the freedom and performativity of literature, Derrida writes:

it is an institution which consists in transgressing and transforming, thus in producing its constitutional law; or, to put it better, in producing discursive forms, “works,” and “events” in which the very possibility of a fundamental constitution is at least “fictionally” contested, threatened, deconstructed, presented in its very precariousness. Hence, while literature shares a certain power and a certain destiny with “jurisdiction,” with the juridico-political production of institutional foundations, the constitutions of states, fundamental legislation, and even the theological-juridical performatives which occur at the beginning of law, at a certain point it can only exceed them, interrogate them, “fictionalize” them: with nothing, or almost nothing, in view, of course, and by producing events whose “reality” or duration is never assured, but which by that very fact are more thought-provoking, if that still means something.¹⁶

Though we might not wish to claim for lyric the juridico-political productive power that literature is here said to share, lyric does partake in that excess of fictionalized foundational performatives, as it posits conditions in poetic events whose reality or duration is never assured and which may indeed seem to have “almost nothing” in view. Formal structures that pose a certain resistance to understanding, they may or may not succeed in inscribing themselves on the memory, with what de Man calls “the senseless power of positional language.”¹⁷

There would seem then to be two interpretations of the performativity of lyric. One sees poems as creating what they name or describe, in a work of truth—dichtung—and would stress in particular the crucial role of metaphor in poetic naming. It would be less comfortable when the tropes of lyric are apostrophe and prosopopoeia and might be sorely tempted to distinguish a true lyric performativity from the facile play of rhetoric. In 1977, in an article entitled “Apostrophe,” I tried to resist that temptation, while pursuing this option, by identifying apostrophe with the fundamental structure of lyric but at the same time with everything that is potentially most pretentious, mystificatory, and embarrassing in the lyric; and I sought to work out how these tropes could be said to make things happen—for example by thrusting their animate presuppositions on the reader or listener with the force of an event.¹⁸ Lamartine’s “Objects inanimés, avez vous done une âme?,”¹⁹ like the question “Have you stopped beating your wife?,” creates a structure from which a reader has trouble disengaging, except by ignoring the poem altogether. The problem, for me, was to find cases where one might argue convincingly that a poem made something happen. The “Ode to the West Wind” would be a case in point, because of the special self-reflexive character of its formulations. And I concluded with the example of Keats’s “This Living Hand,” which, I argued, dares readers to resist it but compels their acceptance of a presence the poem performatively produces.²⁰

Against this account of poetic performativity, the second account of performativity would insist, rather, on the unverifiable and problematic nature of such events and link performativity rather to a performative iterability whose best instance is the lodging of singular formulations in memory. This second account might stress, as Derrida does in “Che cos’é la poesia?,” that the poem, vulnerable like the hedgehog rolled into a ball, makes you want to protect it, learn it by heart, in a “passion de la marque singuliére.” Here the oddity of the poem, its vulnerability to dismissal, is what calls to us, and one might speculate that criticism’s inclination to demonstrate the necessity, the inevitability of poetic combinations—why the poem needs just these words and no other—comes from the knowledge that it is the contingency, the accidents, the otherness of poetic phrases that creates their appeal.

Now it may be that there can be no question of choosing between these accounts—between performativity as the happening of truth or the poem’s creation of what it describes, and the performativity of, shall we say, what manages to repeat, happens to lodge itself in mechanical memory as iterable inscription. There may be no question of choosing because the lyric might be precisely the name of the hope that iterable inscription will be the happening of truth—or, on the contrary, the name of the concealment of inscription and the play of the letter by a thematics of specularity and self-creation, or perhaps—one other possibility—the name of the oscillation between these perspectives.

These possibilities, it seems to me, help to make sense of part of Paul de Man’s complicated and discontinuous account of lyric. De Man speaks of lyric (and other names for genres) as a defensive motion of understanding. This passage, from “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” needs to be quoted at length:

What we call the lyric, the instance of represented voice, conveniently spells out the rhetorical and thematic characteristics that make it the paradigm of a complementary relationship between grammar, trope, and theme. The set of characteristics includes the various structures and moments we encountered along the way [i.e., in the interpretation of Baudelaire’s “Obsession,” which de Man sees as translating the sonnet “Correspondances” into lyric intelligibility]: specular symmetry along an axis of assertion and negation (to which correspond the generic mirror images of the ode, as celebration, and the elegy, as mourning), the grammatical transformation of the declarative into the vocative modes of question, exclamation, address, hypothesis, etc., the tropological transformation of analogy into apostrophe, or the equivalent, more general transformation ... of trope into anthropomorphism. The lyric is not a genre, but one name among several to designate a defensive motion of under standing, the possibility of a future hermeneutics. From this point of view there is no significant difference between one generic term and another: all have the same apparently intentional and temporal function.²¹

Here the suggestion is that lyric, like other genres, is a “term of resistance and nostalgia,” the name we have for a particular way of convincing ourselves not only that language is meaningful and that it will give rise to an intuition or understanding, but that this will be an understanding of the world—an understanding to come.²² But in de Man’s essay there is something else that stands against the lyric thus conceived. Of Baudelaire’s “Correspondances,” he writes, “All we know is that it is, emphatically, not a lyric. Yet it, and it alone, contains, implies, produces, generates, permits (or whatever aberrant verbal metaphor one wishes to choose), the entire possibility of the lyric.”²³ De Man’s phrase “it alone” warns us against distinguishing between two kinds of poetry, one of which is lyric and the other of which—like “Correspondances”—remains unnamed. “Correspondances” seems rather to be a textual singularity—he speaks of its “stutter”—that gets translated into lyric, into lyric intelligibility. “Correspondances” permits him to infer a materiality of language which cannot be isolated as such, as a “moment” or an origin, but which, by standing, as it were, “beneath” lyric (or whatever aberrant formulation one wishes to choose), enables us to identify the figurative structures and operations constitutive of the lyric.

Today, as critical accounts appeal to a performativity which is increasingly seen as both the accomplishment and the justification of literature—the source of claims we might wish to make for it—it seems to me especially important that we consider, in particular cases, what performativity involves and what kinds of distinctions we need to make to talk about such forms as the lyric, which I think merit more sustained attention than they have so far received from or in deconstruction in America.