The Fourth Dimension of a Poem Read online

  This sharp disparity in the frame of theoretical reference comes clear in the noted controversy between John Searle and Jacques Derrida. To Searle, a meaningful sentence taken in isolation, in the absence of the writer, of the intended receiver, and of the context of its original production, is “just a standing possibility of the corresponding (intentional) speech act”—a possibility realized only if we apply to it our ordinary “strategy of understanding the sentence as an utterance of a man who once lived and had intentions like yourself.”9 Derrida, on the contrary, sets out from the general claim that “the total absence of the subject and object of a statement” is “structurally necessary”—that is, essential—to the functioning of any signifying system: “it is required by the general structure of signification, when considered in itself. It is radically requisite” to give “birth to meaning as such.” And it is by adverting not to language-in-human-use but to “the general domain of writing”—in which the “radical absence” both of the writer and the receiver is “inscribed in the structure of the mark” and so “bound to the essential possibility of writing”—that Derrida draws the conclusion that “the system of speech, consciousness, meaning, presence, truth, etc. would be only an effect, and should be analyzed as such.”10

  Derrida not only takes his theoretical stand inside the domain of writing, or language in general, but stays there throughout his deconstructive analyses of the traditional concepts of communication. In discussing his much-quoted assertion of what he called “the axial proposition” of his Grammatology, “Il n’y a rien hors du texte”—“There is nothing outside the text”—Derrida has repeatedly stressed that the term “text,” in his use, does not apply merely to printed pages but “embraces and does not exclude the world, reality, history,” since these “always appear in an experience, hence in a movement of interpretation.”11 Derrida, that is, extrapolates the linguistic paradigm without limit so as to incorporate everything whatever into what he calls “a general writing,” including the human participants and the environing world that are the constitutive elements in the humanistic paradigm. From Derrida’s theoretical stance, all the world’s a text, and the men and women who strive to read it are themselves texts, to themselves as well as to others; and as such, in the inevitable lack of a nontextual “pure presence” or “absolute presence” as an interpretive stopping place, all these have “never been anything but supplements, substitutive significations which could only come forth in a chain of differential references. . . . And thus to infinity.”12

  II. The Personification of the Text

  A conspicuous feature in poststructural theories is that the initiative, signifying intentionality, and goal-directed purposiveness that have been subtracted from the traditional speaker or writer are not simply abolished, but are translocated into attributes of a personified text, or more generally, of a personified language-as-such. Barbara Johnson notes about Paul de Man that “even a cursory perusal of his essays reveals that their insistent rhetorical mode . . . is personification. In the absence of a personal agent of signification, the rhetorical entities themselves are constantly said to ‘know,’ to ‘renounce,’ or to ‘resign themselves’ in the place where the poet or critic as subject has disappeared.” Johnson infers from this phenomenon that such predications do not signify attributes or actions of human agents that have been applied figuratively to language; instead, it indicates that personification is a floating figure per se, equally figurative whether applied to persons or things: “It implies that personification is a trope available for occupancy by either subjects or linguistic entities, the difference between them being ultimately indeterminable, if each is known only in and through a text.”13

  Examination reveals that an insistent prosopopeia of the text is not limited to de Man but is so ubiquitous in deconstructive writings—including those of Barbara Johnson—as to make it a prime identifier of the deconstructive style. In fact, personification seems indispensable to a stance within textuality that, denying an effective role to human enterprise, needs to posit an immanent cunning of différance in order to set a text into motion and to generate its significative and other “effects,” as well as to provide some semblance of directionality to what Derrida calls its “play” and its “working.” Typical is the reiterated assertion that a deconstructive reading is not something that a reader does to a text, but a replication of something that the text has always already done to itself. As Derrida puts this claim: “Deconstruction is not even an act or an operation. . . . Deconstruction takes place, it is an event that does not await the deliberation, consciousness or organization of a subject. . . . It deconstructs it-self. It can be deconstructed. [Ça se déconstruit.]”14

  Attributions of human powers and actions to a text, or else to discourse, are frequent also in other poststructural modes. “It is the text,” Barthes says, “which works untiringly, not the artist or the consumer”; and, in an echo of Heidegger’s “Die Sprache spricht, nicht der Mensch,”: “It is language which speaks, not the author.”15 In the writings of Foucault, it is a disembodied “power,” operating in the social entity and its discourse, that is invested with motility, aims, and productivity. Power, as he says, “traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourse.” “Power must be analysed as something which circulates”; the human individual does not exert power but is himself “an effect of power,” who is “constituted” by power and “at the same time its vehicle.”16 In other types of current theory, a goal-directed enterprise and the production of meaning and effects are attributed to the secret workings, within texts and discourse, of “ideology,” or to an unpersoned agency called “history”—a history, as Stephen Greenblatt epitomizes the assumption of the New Historicism, that is not something external to texts but “is found in the artworks themselves, as enabling condition, shaping force, forger of meaning, censor, community of patronage and reception.”17

  A number of other textual tropes give a distinctive quality to deconstructive and other poststructural writings. Especially pervasive are the figures of violence and murderous conflict that, to the startled traditional reader, make the field of language and discourse seem a killing field. “We must conceive discourse,” Foucault declares, “as a violence that we do to things”; and he decries the static peacefulness of the structural model for semiology:

  One’s point of reference should not be to the great model of language [langue] and signs, but to that of war and battle. The history which bears and determines us has the form of a war rather than that of a language. . . . “Semiology” is a way of avoiding its violent, bloody, and lethal character by reducing it to the calm Platonic form of language and dialogue.18

  In Derrida’s formulations, language is structured by violences throughout. The very fact of naming “is the originary violence of language,” revealing that self-presence is “always already split,” while proper names implicate death, since by their capacity for surviving those that they designate, they inscribe the possibility of their death. In discussing what he claims is “the anxiety with which Rousseau acknowledges the lethal quality of all writing,” Paul de Man explains that “writing always includes the moment of dispossession in favor of the arbitrary power play of the signifier and from the point of view of the subject, this can only be experienced as a dismemberment, a beheading or a castration.”19

  Especially in deconstructive writings, a common model for intertextual conflict is that of an agon, a struggle for mastery between diverse opponents. One of the antagonists may be the intention, as Derrida puts it, of “the presumed subject,” which is always doomed to fail in the attempt to “dominate,” or “command,” or “master” the forces internal to the language of a text. Or it may be the struggle of a reader to understand a text’s meaning; but this endeavor, Hillis Miller says, merely “forces [the reader] to repeat in his own way an effort of understanding that the text expresses, and to repeat also the
baffling of that effort.”20 For the most part, however, deconstructive critics represent both antagonists as inhabitants of the text itself. Paul de Man posits an omnipresent contestation between the regular and the unruly aspects of a text, which he denominates as the constative and cognitive against the performative, or else as the grammatical and logical against the rhetorical, or the aspect of rhetoric as persuasion against the aspect of rhetoric “as a system of tropes.” In each of these modes, the result is an aporia between “two incompatible, mutually self-destructive points of view” that puts “an insurmountable obstacle in the way of a reading or understanding.” In the best-known thumbnail definition of deconstructive criticism, Barbara Johnson formulates it as “the careful teasing out of warring forces of signification within the text itself,” in which there is no “unequivocal domination of one mode of signifying over the other.”21 That is, the antagonistic forces inhabiting a text remain forever locked in the “double-bind” or “aporia” or “abyme” of opposed but unresolvable significations that an all-out deconstructive critic finds in reading any and all works of literature, or, for that matter, in reading any writing whatever.

  III. The Death and Life of the Author:

  Barthes, Foucault, and Horace

  The most widely known representations of the literary text as inherently and autonomously active are the essays by Barthes and Foucault which announce, with Nietzschean melodrama, that the author is dead.22 The demise is not, of course, of the scriptor of a text but of what these theorists describe as a recent social construct, or “figure,” that performs what Foucault calls the “author function.” In literary criticism, it is claimed, the author figure has served not only to classify and interrelate texts under an authorial proper name but also to establish a literary discourse as a property—in Foucault’s terms, as “a product, a thing, a kind of goods”—of which an author is the owner; to ascribe meaning, status, and value to a literary text according to the author to whom it is assigned; to attribute the origins of a text to a “motive” or a “design” in the author construct; and to “explain” it as an expression of that author’s “life, his tastes, his passions.” Both writers agree, furthermore, that the cardinal function of the modern author figure has been to enforce a limit on the free generation of meanings by a literary text. Since the eighteenth century, Foucault says, the “functional principle” of an author “allows a limitation of the cancerous and dangerous proliferation of significations. . . . The author is the principle of thrift in the proliferation of meaning.”23 Roland Barthes hails the emancipation of textual meanings that has now been achieved by the death of the author on whom, he asserts, “the image of literature . . . is tyrannically centered”:

  To give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with a final signified, to close the writing. . . . [But] literature (it would be better from now on to say writing), by refusing to assign a “secret,” an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the world as text), liberates . . . an activity that is truly revolutionary since, to refuse to fix meaning is, in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases—reason, science, law.24

  Several commentators have remarked that Barthes and Foucault wrote their essays in 1968 and 1969 and that they apply to literary texts the perfervid liberation rhetoric of the student uprisings in Paris of May 1968. But whatever the conditions of their production, these essays are often reprinted and have achieved something close to canonical status among poststructural writings. It is worth pausing, therefore, to ask, How accurate, as history, are the stories that Barthes and Foucault tell about the time and the social causes of the emergence, in standard discourse about literature, of the author figure and author functions they describe?

  Both writers assign what Foucault calls “the coming into being of the notion of ‘author,’ ” with respect to literature, to the era between the late seventeenth and early nineteenth centuries; and they agree that the developed author functions are products of the bourgeois ideology engendered by a capitalist economy. The “positivism,” according to Barthes, “which has attached the greatest importance to the ‘person’ of the author” is “the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology”; while to Foucault, the author as textual proprietor and “regulator of the fictive” is “an ideological product” that is “characteristic of our era of industrial and bourgeois society, of individualism and private property.”25 The question suggests itself: How, then, were an author and his functions conceived during the many centuries of written literature before the development of capitalism and its bourgeois ideology—as far back, for example, as classical antiquity? We might glance at Horace’s Ars Poetica, because, although written in verse, its mode of informal advice to a would-be poet is more likely to represent then current discourse about poetry than the more formal or technical writings by Aristotle and other Greek and Roman inquirers.

  We find that Horace takes for granted a situation in which poetic works are grouped and interrelated by assignment to individual authors—he names a range from Homer to his contemporary Virgil—who as composers of their works are responsible for their subject matter, form, and quality, whether to their fame or to their discredit. A good poeta, or “maker”—Horace in his epistle also refers to the poet as auctor and scriptor—must possess native talent (ingenium) but must also train himself to become a master both of language and of the poetic art. The competent poet deliberately designs and orders his poema, adopts and adapts his words, and selects and renders his materials in order to evoke, by their understanding of what he writes, the emotions of his audience or readers, as well as to achieve for them utile and dulce, profit and delight. To the dramatic poet Horace recommends, after he has become “a trained imitator [doctum imitatorem],” that he should look to “life and manners as the model from which to draw talk that is true to life [vivas . . . voces]” (lines 317–18). As a consequence his poem will depict credible and consistent persons such as are familiar to its readers—persons who must themselves express feelings if they are to evoke those feelings: “Si vis me flere, dolendum est / primum ipsi tibi” (lines 102–3).

  What of the function that would seem most plausibly specific to authorship under capitalism—that which invests an author with proprietorship of a text that is sold for profit? According to Foucault, the conception of a literary text as “a kind of goods” that is “caught up in a circuit of ownership” developed “once a system of ownership for texts came into being . . . at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century.”26 But some two thousand years before that, Horace had declared that a poetic book that both instructs and delights the reader (lines 343–45) will not only be posted overseas and prolong the author’s fame; it will also “earn money for the Sosii,” the famed Roman booksellers.27 We know from sources besides Horace that, even in an era when texts were published in papyrus rolls that were copied by hand, there was a flourishing trade in the making, selling, and exporting of books for profit.28 Horace also warns us (lines 372–73) that “for poets to be mediocre has never been tolerated—not by men, or gods, or columnae.” Columnae is usually translated simply as “booksellers”; but it in fact denoted the columns or pillars outside a bookseller’s establishment on which he advertised his wares. Clearly, Horace conceived and discussed books of poetry as commodities advertised for profitable sale, in which the author had not only a personal involvement as his individual accomplishment but a proprietary interest as well.

  It seems, then, that whatever the differences in economic and legal circumstances and in conceptual nuances, the figure and functions of a literary author in the cultivated discourse of Horace’s time were pretty much what they are now, at least in non-poststructural discussions. More generally, and more important, Horace clearly takes for granted a version of the humanistic paradigm—a version in which a purposive author designs and effects a poetic work that represents, or “imitates,” credible human beings and actions and is addressed t
o the understanding and the emotional and pleasurable responsiveness of human readers. And if we look further, we find this paradigm, as well as similar conceptions of the role of a literary author, in Aristotle’s Poetics, in Longinus on the sublime style, and in the classical writers on rhetoric.

  Afterward, this overall frame of reference for critical treatments of poetry, and of literature in general, remained in place for some two millennia. The large-scale changes that occurred in the long history of literary criticism can be mapped mainly in terms of an altering focus on one or another of the elements within this frame, as the emphasis shifted between the makeup of the environing world; the needs and preferences of readers; the temperament, imagination, and emotional processes of the author; and the internal requirements of the work itself as the primary (although almost never exclusive) determinant in making a literary work what it is.29 The human world of language-in-use thus served as a locus and paradigmatic frame for almost all general discourse about literature until three or four decades ago, when it was displaced by the theory worlds of structural and poststructural criticism.