Читать книгу Deconstruction Is/In America - Anselm Haverkamp - Страница 18

Cynthia Chase

You haven’t really read something until you’ve read it as an epitaph, said a friend of a friend of mine to whom I told this title. Tell them that.

To read something as an epitaph. Not yet having begun to think, what would that mean? one recognizes the prescription, and one’s head fills up with words. Wordsworth’s. I want to talk about the “Essay upon Epitaphs” (the first one), which is one of the datable moments at which literature and epitaph define one another, partly in certain familiar post-Romantic terms: what more obviously than an epitaph should be universal, “permanent,” and sincere? Taking the epitaph as a paradigm for writing is one of the great power plays in humanism’s history, whatever else one has to say about it. By the same token, Wordsworth’s “Essay upon Epitaphs” could be titled “Epitaph on Literature.”

De Man’s “Autobiography as De-facement” notes that the Wordsworth text states a preference for epitaphs written “in the third person,” from the position of the survivor, over those in the “first person,” those that “personate the deceased.” I quote the reading that is for many a familiar:

Yet at several points throughout the three essays, Wordsworth cautions consistently against the use of prosopopoeia, against the convention of having the “Sta Viator” adressed to the traveler on the road of life by the voice of the departed person. Such chiasmic figures, crossing the conditions of death and of life with the attributes of speech and of silence are, says Wordsworth, “too poignant and too transitory”—a curiously phrased criticism, since the very movement of consolation is that of the transitory and since it is the poignancy of the weeping “silent marble,” as in Gray’s epitaph on Mrs. Clark, for which the essays strive.¹

Citing the lines that Wordsworth’s text leaves out from its quotation of Milton’s sonnet-epitaph “On Shakespeare”: “... thou … Dost make us marble . . .,” “Autobiography as De-facement” remarks,

“Doth make us marble”, in the Essays upon Epitaphs, cannot fail to evoke the latent threat that inhabits prosopopoeia, namely that by making the death speak, the symmetrical structure of the trope implies, by the same token, that the living are struck dumb. … The surmise of the “Pause, Traveller!” [conventional to epitaphs] thus acquires a sinister connotation that is not only the prefiguration of one’s own mortality but our actual entry into the frozen world of the dead.²

To read great literature, Milton’s “On Shakespeare” says, is to be turned to stone, and because Wordsworth’s essay-epitaph perceives and performs that threat, it erases those lines of Milton that pronounce it.

In teaching a reading such as this, de Man conveyed the experience of reading in the original. That one might read Wordsworth in the original, not in translation. Into, say, German or Flemish or French. No one of de Man’s formation would do such a thing, of course, but that English wasn’t one’s first language means something: the slight effort and unobviousness that that phrase “to read something in the original” conveys. “Death” for “dead” (and vice versa), “doth” for “dost,” “debt” (“deat’ ”) for “death”—now all those slips are finds, just because they may or may not have meaning; shells, coquilles. To read in the original means not to “know,” right off, what counts as a mere idiom, an assonance, a cliché, and so to have to reconstruct, painstakingly, a sense, of which the stresses may be altogether different than the emphases of the spoken and “understood” text. To this day I listen with dismay and cringing to how The Prelude sounds as “read” by English-born actors. I mean to praise here, though, not an alternative authenticity, another “original,” but a chance. “Slow reading,” Barbara Johnson calls it in a recent paper on some of these same texts. It gives the chance of unwinding the words from the meanings they (in phrases, in sentences, in verses) have over and over had. Reading in the original a text in a language not your own: this is the experience promised by literature (not only “Comparative Literature”), and a tolerable metaphor, perhaps a tolerable instance, of the “experience” of history, alternately that of intelligibility and of unintelligibility in a rhythm one may or may not pick up. But I bring up the matter of language learning also because it offers a real “correlate” to the “actual entry into the frozen world of the dead” that de Man’s text speaks of. Not knowing what elements of a text to “read” and what to silently read past or through: it’s that banal and ghastly predicament of the language student that is the condition of “really reading something.” To borrow again my opening words, and (for the longest time, if not “permanently”) for all that vou can say about it, that epitaph might as well be yours.

What does it mean to take as one’s model for language (or even just for writing) epitaphs, as Wordsworth’s “Essay” does? (That move compares with the stories in Rousseau’s Second Discourse and Essai sur l’origine des langues, which alternately award priority to passion and to need.) Surely it means an attempt to realize, to phenomenalize, the ontology we too readily “think” (or receive the idea) is implicit i.e., present, in language or in writing, which to “be” language has to be able to mean something when you or I are no longer “there.”

Regenerating a description of this possibility or “predicament” that would not have the illusory ease and familiarity of that description takes more care than I could manage; one goes back to Limited Inc. (1988) and “Sign and Symbol.” So just say that there is no one time at which anything “takes place.” Wordsworth’s move could be seen as an attempt to translate this possibility—this “predicament”—into aesthetic and generic terms and thereby naturalize and undo or alleviate it. An apologia for language, modulating into a threat—that’s how the Essays on Epitaphs, at a certain pace, read. Wordsworth’s Essay would give a face to the enigma of how the meaning gets to the words. And no answers are excluded, including “from things.” To say “from things” doesn’t necessarily put you in empiricism or positivism, especially, in “our” traditions, if the things in question are trees, rocks, or can be called “she” or “elle” (or “T”).

“It is to be remembered,” the “Essay” reads, “that to raise a monument is a sober and a reflective act; that the inscription which it bears is intended to be permanent, and for universal perusal.” And also:

an epitaph is not a proud writing shut up for the studious: it is exposed to all—to the wise and the most ignorant; ... it is concerning all, and for all ... for this reason, the thoughts and feelings expressed should be permanent also—liberated from that weakness and anguish of sorrow which is in nature transitory, and which with instinctive decency retires from notice. … The very form and substance of the monument which has received the inscription, and the appearance of the letters, testifying with what a slow and laborious hand they must have been engraven, might seem to reproach the author who had given way upon this occasion to transports of mind, or to quick turns of conflicting passion; though the same might constitute the life and beauty of a funeral oration or an elegiac poem.³

In a proper epitaph—and the epitaph is the model for literature and for history, for Wordsworth’s text—the medium dictates to the message-sender, and “turns” of thought and feeling come into being only because of the materialization, the immobilization, that fixes them to a grave.

What peculiar power the text ascribes to writing with the qualities that—sometime before and after this text—were identified with literature, great literature: universality, universal readability, permanence. And at the same time, what a soft sell! “Have feelings that are universal and permanent,” says the house of language, “—because gravestones are.” The evidence suggests that Wordsworth was alarmed by and not skilled in the making of advertisements, and in this text too perhaps that shows. What peculiar power this passage in Wordsworth’s “Essay” ascribes to a kind of writing: the power to determine what sort of feelings the writer should have: hegemonic power. And not from Gramsci’s jail did “hegemony” appear more insidious or more important. But is such power, read—Is such power, when designated, explained, as it is in Wordsworth’s text—or even when exercised (say this passage is “merely an exercise”); is such power, through such a text, being established, or being unraveled? There isn’t an answer, but outcomes that change as one listens for them by silently deciding and redeciding how to segment the text’s semantic and syntactic structures. “‘In’ Wordsworth’s text,” we have to concede, then, is a no-place; in what time we read those words, what time we see those words, is crucial. How much time do you have; what time do you take it to be. This seems to me a way to describe the practical difficulty of trying to practice ideology critiques and or deconstructions.

It’s something Jacques Derrida said, I think. It could also be under his aegis that one would move from a rhetorical analysis of the Wordsworth passage to a meditation upon politics and grief, starting off from the text’s oracular and circular definition of “liberation,” of being “liberated from that weakness and anguish of sorrow which is in nature transitory, and which with instinctive decency retires from notice.” The circular or suspended judgment implied by the restrictive clause—“which is in nature transitory”— empties out and mitigates the brutality as well as the rigor that could inhere in that next phrase, “instinctive decency.” (And nevertheless, whether or not they can spot restrictive clauses, and whether or not it’s “there” “in the original,” writing students tend to get the message: “the thoughts and feelings expressed should not be those that anyone with any decency instinctively suppresses.” The sheer laboriousness of language that signifies through its syntax—not just the reading teacher—inhibits, stills.) In “other” cultures, including Greek (modern and ancient), anguish of sorrow does not “with instinctive decency retire from notice” but makes itself heard in laments—women’s laments in particular.⁴ They are en route, no doubt, to silence, or to writing. Or at least Wordsworth’s language could have the effect, the power, of making us believe that the kind of mourning and the kind of day and the kind of literature his lines evoke has all the prestige, power, and inevitability of death.

Wordsworth’s lines have the signal virtue, I’d argue, of noting that connection; of noting that a certain kind of writing, the kind we value, the “permanent” kind, takes its authority from a certain—very particular and peculiar—way of handling death: handling it via the word “grave” and the idea of monuments and of inscriptions. And in this the Wordsworth passage marks a line of thought recently taken up in Derrida’s reflections on death, particularly at the point at which they move between Being and Time and its countering in texts of Levinas that suggest that not one’s ownmost, my own death, but the other’s death, has priority among our conditions of existence. Where is mourning addressed, how is grief redressed, in Sein und Zeit, was more than a passing question, in Derrida’s conférence for the second Derrida symposium at Cérisy. How might one go between Wordsworth, Derrida, and de Man on mourning, and Heidegger on “mood?” I’m not competent to pursue or really even pose these questions, so I will return to the connection of death and literature again in another way.

I want to go on with an important idea in the “Autobiography as De-facement” passage, that an epitaph, that literature, does not “leave us in quiet” (to quote Wordsworth again) but repositions text and reader and pushes you to the ground. (Albeit “marble.” Keats, in “The Fall,” anyway (“life to Milton would be death to me”), knew that even on a marble stair one could moulder away.) De Man’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s essay on “translation” generates another lurid figure of writing or reading. It is some sentences that come back at me like the inscribed letters of a badly written epitaph, a permanent reproach—first because these lines have already been written about repeatedly, and second because they reproach one for the failure and the wish to understand the reproach they make and the threat they bespeak. The reproach and the threat are understood, I should say, in Neil Hertz’s essay “Lurid Figures.” But here they are again. The lines are of Paul de Man, from the 1983 Messenger Lecture at Cornell University entitled “ ‘Conclusions’: Walter Benjamin’s ‘The Task of the Translator’,” and the antecedent of the “they” that is the subject of these lines is “translations.” A previous sentence links translation with other “activities” that are “intralinguistic,” namely “critical philosophy, literary theory, history.” “They are all intralinguistic,” writes de Man, “they relate to what in the original belongs to language, and not to meaning as an extralinguistic correlate susceptible of paraphrase and imitation.” Then this:

They disarticulate, they undo the original, they reveal that the original was always already disarticulated. They reveal that their failure, which seems to be due to the fact that they are secondary in relation to the original [as the engraving in stone of the epitaph is secondary in relation to its writing, its composition], reveals an essential failure, an essential disarticulation which was already there in the original.

In the original feelings—”Felt,” as we say, only if they were suitable for a stone. Here now is the sentence I come back to: They kill the original, by discovering that the original was already dead.

We are so used to violent imagery and “negativity” that it’s easy to pass by on the other side (the meaning side) of these words even after, or all the more after, they were seen and read by Neil Hertz as a remarkable instance of the lurid figures in de Man’s writing, and interpreted in terms of the “pathos of uncertain agency” that their oxymoron or equivocation—“kill,” “discover dead”—summons up. So I want to broach again the question of what it could mean to “find already dead” a text, a work, a figure.

Instinctive knowledge that I’ll be saved by our time limits leaving me only a few more minutes alone enables me to take up this text. For I don’t want to think about its figures. I want only to spell out not a certain set of alternatives, but a sort of equivocal outcome that the figures may mean. “That two-handed engine at the door,” says “Lycidas.” Translation is such an engine, which, perhaps, “stands ready to smite once and smite no more,” but, so I’d translate, never once