I was talking to a literature professor the other day who told me that, once, when she was having a conversation with Derrida, he confessed to her that he always wanted to be a literary critic.It's not a totally surprising confession, and I've heard similar things before. But what was new to me, what I'd never really heard before, was the "always." It's almost colloquial, of course: "I always wanted to do that..." But it also hit home to me the sort of constancy of this desire, a sort of perpetuation of it despite everything that happened. In other words, it hit home the fact that if this was true, it was a sort of longing that years and years couldn't kill off, a sort of need, more fundamental to his whole sense of self, that ranged all throughout his very long life.
I should have asked more about the circumstances of the conversation, but all this was hitting home so much that I remained silent and kept thinking. Because what was becoming interesting to me was that if this all was true--and in fact even if it wasn't, it at least was a fabrication, a story, and therefore a concern that must have been kept up for so very long that it almost would be true by virtue of that--the question would not be Why did he always want this? but, Why didn't he just become one? If he always wanted to do this, what kept him from it? So I asked this--it seems like the professor had similar thoughts and asked it too--and the response he gave was that he felt he didn't have the training.
Now, again, I've heard this before. One can find similar sentiments in "Ulysses Gramophone" all over the place, where Derrida is anxious about talking to literature professors about Joyce. And because I have heard him say this, I protested--trying to talk to Derrida, as it were, through my professor, trying to get a little more response out of her/him. This is the way one deals with him now, through his incorporations and introjections, which survive. You don't need any better proof than this of how inscription for Derrida is not merely something that happens with pencil and paper (writing in the narrow sense), but can happen precisely as oral transmission of someone's still open history, as memories that, almost completely without sadness or drama, in the routine act of conversing, write what can still be called an elegy, perform what can still be called a mourning. I said, speaking to her/him, "But that's preposterous! He must have read I.A. Richards or something!"
What I meant was that our training as literary critics can be picked up elsewhere than in our departments. This is so much the case that I was sure that he had actually already picked it up, some time still in the 50's, perhaps, over the course of a week or so while classes at the École Normale were not so demanding and other little interests could be pursued, helped by an upper or two. Or, more likely, prompted by this week or so which I imagine (and which probably happened even earlier, at Louis-le-Grand, as he has a couple papers on Shakespeare dating from this period which you can find at the Irvine archives), the interest consolidated itself and actually became training as he sat in a class or two at Harvard in '57. Regardless, I wanted to press her/him on what more "training" could possibly have meant so that he could consider himself not somehow already qualified to engage in criticism. Doubtless, it probably functioned (without being said in an ironic, sneering tone--it is of course a humble remark) as an ironic way of saying that he did not have the affiliations with an literature department that he would need so that he could be confined, as it were, to writing merely literary criticism. In other words, he always wanted to be a literary critic, but also, because of the necessities of his project, of his writing, didn't want to in a way. What he wrote necessitated that he couldn't work merely on that register--and this has its benefits as he gets to say, sometimes, more important things than we normally say.
Or maybe I cast this irony in the wrong way. It isn't a matter of him also not really wanting to do what he says he always wanted to do. It is that he perhaps indeed really wanted to do this, but that his project dictated that necessity, the necessity of being outside the discourse of literary criticism, be conceived in a different way--precisely as a necessity that one can be subject to while also wanting to do precisely the opposite of what it dictates. Derrida can want to be a literary critic, then, precisely because his writing must fall outside the register of literary criticism--and in such a way that this doesn't mean that he also thanks his stars on some level that he is not confined to our puny discourse, mere literary criticism. What he wants just cannot be in conflict with necessity, so when he says he always wanted to be a literary critic, this doesn't mean that because he wasn't one, he in truth wanted to be something different. We don't have to get him to lie to make it seem like this is why he didn't pursue this desire of his. As you can see, to do this is to begin to consider necessity as necessity, and wants as wants.
Regardless, she/he answered by saying that well, perhaps he got this training from his friend Paul de Man. And, because the tone in which she/he said this was not just matter of fact, I take this to mean something other than that he could have also had a sort of scene of initiation to the tricks of what we do, similar to the one I imagined in the '50's, in the '60's in cafes in Paris with de Man talking about Rousseau. I take it more to mean instead that his friendship with Paul de Man, as it developed more and more then and in the years to come at Yale, was perhaps the area in which this training did maybe occur. That is, if he was lying about his lack of training, it could only be here, in this friendship, that this training did indeed really happen. That means that where he was, indeed, a literary critic was not in his essays and books during the period he associated with de Man, but in the friendship with de Man itself. It is here that he did not follow the necessity that fell upon him and remained alongside his wants. Which means that it was, indeed, a real friendship, a friendship he wanted. But--and this is where I both want to leave off and must leave off--we begin to feel that what he wanted here was also, because it was really a want qua want, necessitated (which means also that the necessities too, as necessities, were wants)...
5 comments:
Hi Mike,
This was a really interesting post. One thing to keep in mind, maybe, when thinking about Derrida's remark, is that literary criticism in France is if anything even *more* specialized and academicized than it is in America (or England). (I actually just saw a film, called "Poison Friends" — directed by Pierre Bourdieu's son Emmanuel! — about literary graduate study in Paris; it makes it seem way more competitive and pressurized than anything we have, or have ever had, here.) So it makes sense that even Derrida, who we (or at least I) tend to think of as being intimidatingly smart and learned himself, felt intimidated by that culture in France, and waited until he came to America and started working with de Man to engage with literature more deeply.
Also, I'm interested in what you say about Derrida writing on Shakespeare in the 50s. What are those texts like? How much have you rooted around in the Irvine archives? I'd be fascinated to hear. (Maybe this is more of a topic for face-to-face conversation than comment boxes, though.)
Hmm... "Competitive and pressurized." While I agree, I also wonder whether it is, as you also said, just more specialized--that is, organized differently, such that we don't necessarily have to make it sound as if the French are smarter. They have such a small set of elite--the figures are actually, I think, quite scandalous--that what appears as competition often is just a huge huge mutual ego-trip for everyone involved. I say all this because I frankly don't think that Derrida felt intimidated by the French study in literature--and that I do think he actually found it more intimidating here. Why? Because I think he found this specialized culture--like many Algerians, poor people in France, or just anyone outside the loop--simply insane and caught up in its own dilemmas that don't really count for anything. That is, I think he found it just insulated and silly--he certainly found philosophy in France that way, and his professional efforts to try and open it up on all fronts (curriculum, admission policies, requirements & grades etc.) reflect this. I mean, you have to think of the amazing thing that American universities and even highschools do that they don't do in France: allow a much more wide ranging education. So when he sees the types of questions that Paul de Man is asking, which are quite frankly less involved in the merits of their structural twists and turns (what they are able to do with a text--something like structuralist/semiotic criticism, which looks to us now as very rigorous, ironically) than what they give our understanding of the field of literature more generally (practical criticism's legacy), I do think that he found this much more relevant and probably something that required more expertise than he could have. In Circumfession he says something about how he rues not being able to write in the easy, relaxed style--what I think he's lamenting there is the sort of skill it takes in the American university to talk to many people at once, from all sorts of backgrounds, about something as odd as a text.
Anyway, that's my take on what I see--I could be totally wrong though. You are most definitely right about the intimidating nature of it all there and its intense specialization (they basically take you up as a little kid and make you into an intellectual thought-producing machine). But regardless, I haven't looked at the archives, but I plan to next time I'm back at home in CA... perhaps December I can arrange it. It's fascinating. I don't know exactly what his essays on literature were (ones that look like ours, that is), but he wrote two at least from what I see (he wrote them at the Lycee, in English--I wonder why, perhaps someone was teaching there...). Their titles (prepare yourself): "'Poetry of Twilight' in Collins' 'Ode to Evening' and in Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,'" and "Shakespeare's Idea of Kingship (after Henry IV, Act III, Scene 1)." Freaking awesome.
Check out the large (I think still partial) list of what the archives have ("Phenomenology and metaphysics of the secret" as a dissertation for the lycee! How freaking awesome could that be--he's already moving towards where he might end up):
http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/uci.html
"just more specialized--that is, organized differently, such that we don't necessarily have to make it sound as if the French are smarter"
Oh yeah, I definitely didn't mean to imply that, or even that the educational system is better-organized than in the States (between what you say and what Derrida and Bourdieu say, that seems quite evidently not the case). I just meant that "literary critic" has a powerful cachet in France that I don't think it has here: they have a long history of brilliant critics, after all (Sainte-Beuve, Taine, etc.) and literature is just much more bound up with the national self-image than in America, for better or worse. All of which could contribute to a feeling of unworthiness, even in a man who was, clearly, not afraid of intervening in a multitude of different specialized discourses that interested him. (I would have to think the Algerian identity plays a role here as well.)
Another stray question: do you know what JD's relationship to Barthes was like? That would be interesting to factor into the "always wanted to be a literary critic" equation as well.
This may be a good time to recall that Derrida's original dissertation proposal had the title "On the Ideality of the Literary Object"....
Thank you Michael, you are totally right: I mean, that's what is interesting about Derrida--essentially his theses regarding writing were attempts at a phenomenological ontology of the literary object or work. Of Grammatology can be summed up in a sentence that moves from this towards more general statements about inscription: any phenomenology of writing will either idealize writing or, if it tries to carry out its task rigorously, will destroy phenomenology--thus the need to split the difference somehow by responsibly interweaving both possibilities.
And Evan, you're right--sorry for my sort of intentionally stupid rendering of what you were saying... I just had a lot of things on my mind regarding the merits of the American (I won't add an Anglo to this, since I think England might be a little more fucked-up than us) system. Though I did mean to hit at a problem, which is that describing these differences, especially with Derrida involved, leads one quickly I think to a language of smartness... I led it there myself, that is, not you, but I do think the problem is important: the first generation of Derrida-scholars really wanted to appear smarter than their fellows by aligning themselves with the French system and thus trying to show, I think, that they were supplementing the science-oriented US education with the French. This is why you don't see people acting like Spivak in relationship to Derrida when they affiliate themselves more with Germany--Samuel Weber for example, who remains very Derridian but humble and calm about it.
Sorry for these sorts of throwaway allusions, I know they need much more to make them into full thoughts, but I gotta run quick.
But I'm just really riffing on what you said: "literature is just much more bound up with the national self-image than in America, for better or worse." People exploited that self-image to turn Derrida precisely into a Frenchman, I think, not unlike they made him into a philosopher of language (which was the most absurd thing going, of course)--its precisely what he was not. So I'm just wary about anything in the ballpark of what we're talking about, and want to cast the questions all differently. This isn't really as responsible as your questions, though, which rightly look closely at the ins and outs of the work of cultural production and fit Derrida into this scheme.
I should also mention that my example of insulated or too structural/semiotic French thinking about literature, Genette, was really poorly chosen, because Genette was precisely a close friend of Derrida's.
Anyway, to the real question: Derrida and Barthes. You should read that essay in Psyche I that is his eulogy to Barthes, that might help this. I don't know biographically if he was close to him, really. But he was very, very aware of what he was up to--even though in that eulogy (which is a reading of Camera Lucida) he says he really hasn't read much of him beyond Degree Zero and probably Mythologies, if I remember right. I mean, you couldn't not be aware of Barthes and what he was up to if you worked in France. From what I see in his work though, Derrida always was somewhat respectful of what Barthes was doing: he didn't, like many Marxists or Lacanians, merely make Barthes into the myth-breaker he was in Mythologies in order to dismiss him. The most prevalent reference, I think, is to the concept of the degree zero, which, if I remember right, is oddly translated by Spivak throughout Grammatology even though it comes up like 5 or 6 times--so you might miss it if you aren't looking for it (I suspect Spivak didn't know much, if any, of Barthes--one of the many reasons I think that book would benefit from being retranslated--and so translated the French more literally, not understanding that it was a sort of standardized concept in France. That said, it wasn't translated into english I think until 2 or 3 years after Grammatology came out here, so there just simply was no standardized way of referring to it in English at all--no one was really reading Barthes until the 70's.). So I don't think they spoke much, is what I'm saying. But Derrida didn't bash him. He simply used what was floating in the air at that time in Paris--cause you couldn't ignore it--but kept himself out of the popular ways of dismissing Barthes at the same time. In short, I just think he didn't really know much about Barthes and so in that case felt himself unqualified to talk about him.
That might be an instance of what you are talking about, that is. I don't really think so, however--simply because I do think the resistance is more internal than one of intimidation to begin with. There's something just uninteresting, I think, for Derrida in writing on literature. It comes too close to a hermeneutic effort--not so much in its procedures, which he knows how to circumvent, but in the mere fact that it choses a text to write about instead of, say, some sort of philosophical concept which exists in a book but also can be said to float around governing all sorts of things (like "free will," for example). Literature itself--as an object--just seems a little limited to him, in my view. I mean, I take that view because I think if Derrida wanted to write about something, lord knows, he would have done it. Fucking Lacan couldn't keep him away from psychoanalysis, in other words--so why could the literary establishment?
I buy here, though, the remark about literature having much more cultural import, and literary critics seen more as significant thinkers there than here. That most definitely could be at work, and could be another angle to go down instead of mine, which is too deconstructionist perhaps (rethinking necessity, as I say in the post).
Post a Comment