Language

I am rereading Frances Ferguson's excellent early work, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (1977). I remember the following statement well, though, not only because it is the first, most concise articulation of a position that will run through the rest of Ferguson's work, but also because I have always thought it the most sensible and most demanding of any possible position. In other words, I have--when push comes to shove--always come back and stuck to the approach it outlines:

The recent re-examination of literary language which has flourished increasingly in criticism is an attempt to articulate the implication of the statement that all literature is necessary linguistic. Yet this very preoccupation with language, which heuristically substitutes an interest in linguistic process for an interest in literary content (mythic, thematic, psychological), can itself become a rehearsal of pat answers and artificially persistent mysteries when "language" is taken as an absolute. The paradox that language is both the most familiar and the ultimately unknown element in any individual's experience seems overwhelming until we recognize once again that literary texts not only postpone but also mock whatever éblouissement the paradox inspires. Thus, this study anchors itself in texts--not because the text has iconic absoluteness but because the text is there to be read, and the reading itself can alone demonstrate the legitimacy of speaking as though any literary work reveals a consciousness of language and a simultaneous consciousness of its erosion of a mythically exalted status for language.
-Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit, 2-3.

Remember this was said in 1977, at the height of what would be called, outside literature departments, "the linguistic turn." In other words it underscores what some people outside the discipline--as Tim Morton nicely puts it in a nice recent interview (and indeed Ferguson is talking about structuralism)--don't seem to understand in their (justified) backlash against postmodern excess (which it is misleading to heap on literature departments): language in some absolute sense was and is never, seriously, that big of a deal for most literary critics. Dealing mostly with words, sentences, meters, styles, plots, forms, genres, and other concrete things (over which we have an unparalleled, yet teachable mastery), what we know of languge is something abstract--not absolute. Absolutized, literary critics would never know what to do with it! How could we? The only people who did do this--those around de Man and some of the other star figures of yesteryear--were and are (and they merit this, though the suspicion is not always for the right reason) suspect throughout the discipline precisely for being so vague, and often treating the texts we read as props for something larger--and, let's just be frank, much less interesting. But Ferguson's suspicion towards the exaltation or absolutization of "language" is not the only thing or the main thing that I have found so useful here: the last sentence is in fact perhaps the most important, and is what makes the position both more positive and indeed most demanding, as I said above. What characterizes reading critically is this speaking "as though," which requires engagement with or a test of the text to be read--and not in any way that would (Wimsatt-like) absolutize this latter beyond the bounds of the test. What's more, to think of reading in this way is actually (like Ferguson does: the author of Solitude and the Sublime and Pornography, the Theory is certainly not anti-theory at all) to believe in and promote theorizing--not to reject it--for this is one way the "as though" can be refined (the "something larger" can be helpful and, depending on how it is developed, further concretize the often ambiguous operations involved in reading, though it is not really related to reading in the sense developed here--and indeed de Man can be extremely helpful). I might recall also a comment of one of my professors with which Ferguson's seems to resonate (and which I more and more agree with), even though he is looking backward at precisely the time she is writing this: as readers of literature, we never really were theorists but readers who hoped, who believed in, the possibility of theory--who were (and still are) in favor of having some theory.