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Literatureand Language: A Commentary
Paul de Man
2 Chatman, p. 220.
3 Riffaterre, p. 39.
4 Fish, p. I61.
5 George Steiner, "Whorf, Chomsky and the Student of Literature," NLH,
this issue, pp. 15-34.
6 Riffaterre, p. 39.
7 Riffaterre, p. 47.
LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE: A COMMENTARY 183
that can be substituted almost at will, but they could not come into
being without an opposite against which they offer their own defini-
tions and alternatives. They imply a fundamental misreading of litera-
ture which is always, systematically, a misreading performed by
others.11
If one accepts this complication as a purely formal pattern, without
going into the specific merits and demerits of each individual position,
it would follow that the specificity of literary language resides in the
possibility of misreading and misinterpretation. We realize this all
the more strongly when passing from the critical parts of the articles
-with which it is, in general, quite easy to agree-to the parts in
which the authors propose their own corrected readings. As soon as
this happens, we feel inclined to find them in error together with the
writers they have been censoring. One experiences little difficulty fol-
lowing Fish in his criticism of Richards, Riffaterre in his assault on
literal-minded historians, Chatman in his strictures on Barthes, or
Steiner in his admonitions to Chomsky. But as soon as they offer their
own readings, our own critical sense reawakens. The critiques deserve
the treatment they get at the hands of the critiquants, but the latter
turn at once into critiques in their own right without in the least re-
deeming their original targets. We are entirely willing to accept what
has by now grown into a double pattern of juxtaposed aberration.
When Riffaterre, for example (singled out for no other reason than
that the example he uses happens to be in a field with which I am
familiar), in his reading of Baudelaire's poem "Bohemiens en
voyage,"12 denies any relevance to the Callot etchings which served
as a model for the poem, the temptation to disagree with him is
irresistible. How can he claim that the Callot work is merely an
"exercise in the picturesque" when, for Baudelaire, Callot, the inspirer
of E. T. A. Hoffmann, rates with Goya, Breughel, Constantin Guys,
and other revered names as a representative of the highest "philosophi-
cal art" and a practitioner of an aesthetics of absolute irony?13 How
can he fail to see the impact that Callot's background-presence in
the poem is bound to have on the concluding lines which, according to
Riffaterre, the reader is "free to interpret as Death or cosmic mys-
tery"?14 How can he find an opposition between Callot and the Quest
I Lest this be misconstrued as a criticism, let me hasten to point out that the
same observation also applies to this brief commentary.
12 Riffaterre, pp. 41-42.
13 The main references to Callot in Baudelaire are in the well-known essays
"De L'essence du rire" and "L'art philosophique."
14 Riffaterre, p. 42. The last lines of the poem speak of "... ces voyageurs, pour
lesquels est ouvert / L'empire familier des tenebres futures."
LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE: A COMMENTARY I85
at the exclusion of the other. More important still, each of the terms is
highly ambiguous in its own right. Each has the possibility of misread-
ing built into its own constitution; they can indeed be said to be the
conceptual denomination of this possibility. To start with imitation,
Markiewicz denies that fictionality can be called a universal char-
acteristic of literature by invoking the case of memoirs and letters as
opposed to novels: are we to infer from this that everything stated
in memoirs or in letters is true and that novels are made up exclusively
of lies? Mimesis can be said to imply a referential verification as well
as to dodge it; the only thing that can be stated with certainty is that
it allows for the confusion between the two choices. As for metaphor,
the mischief wrecked by this wiliest of Pandora's boxes defies the chal-
lenge of trying to evoke it in a few words; the one example mentioned
by Markiewicz, Hegel's distinction between "eigentliche Verbild-
lichung" and "uneigentliche Verbildlichung" (literal and figural
representation) leads directly into the infinitely deceiving epistemology
of representation and into the innumerable ways in which it is possible
to confuse images and things. The dangerously seductive powers of
paranomasis are easier to convey. We only have to remind ourselves
that Jakobson based his discussion of the figure on the phonetic analysis
of the slogan "I like Ike"; euphony is probably the most insidious of
all sources of error. By merely following up Markiewicz's own cate-
gories, we reach the conclusion that the determining characteristic of
literary language is indeed figurality, in the somewhat wider sense of
rhetoricity, but that, far from constituting an objective basis for literary
study, rhetoric implies the persistent threat of misreading. Whether it
also implies the impossibility of truthful reading could hardly be
decided in the space of a few sentences. Markiewicz's brief but sug-
gestive essay provides categories and a terminology by means of which
this investigation could proceed, but concludes in the illusion of a
false precision at the very moment when it has in fact revealed the
inevitability of confusion.
Of all the essays considered in this commentary, the one closest to
treating reading explicitly as a problem is Stanley Fish's "Literature in
the Reader: Affective Stylistics." For Fish, the utterance of meaning
cannot be separated from the process by means of which this meaning
is reached or, stated more radically, meaning can only be the narrative
of this temporal process and cannot be reduced to statement. "An
observation about the [literary] sentence as an utterance-its refusal
to yield a declarative statement-has been transformed into an account
of its experience (not being able to get a fact out of it). It is no longer
an object, a thing-in-itself, but an event, something that happens to,
LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE: A COMMENTARY 189
and with the participation of, the reader. And it is this event, this hap-
pening... that is, I would argue, the meaning of the sentence."19 The
merits of the position are clearly in evidence in the examples discussed
in the article: we are freed at last from the tedious business of para-
phrase and from the less tedious but mystified practice of thematic
reconstruction and rearrangement. What we are offered instead is
certainly much closer to the actual event of literary understanding.
The question must arise, however, what the truth value of such a
narrative can be and whether one can afford to be as unworried about
this as Fish seems to be. His reading-stories unquestionably contain
many episodes of aberration and deceit: "what the sentence does is
give the reader something and then take it away, drawing him on with
the unredeemed promise of its return"; "the two negatives combine ...
to prevent the reader from making the simple (declarative) sense
which would be the goal of a logical analysis"; "that construction ...
pressures the reader to perform exactly those mental operations whose
propriety the statement of the sentence-what it is saying-is challeng-
ing,"20 etc. The relationship between author and reader is a highly
dramatic one, but it tells a rather sordid story in which the reader is
manipulated and exploited by a callous author who, in the course of
a few random quotations, appears as an evil counselor, a temptor
who fails to deliver the goods, and, above all, as a falsifier of truth.
The reason why this sorry situation is allowed to develop is not
because the category of meaning has been undermined but because it
has been displaced: the author himself, rather than the referent of
the statement, now seems to be the sole depository of meaning. He
can play with the reader as a cat plays with a mouse because, being
in full control of his own meaning, he can conceal and reveal it at his
discretion. We are told, for example, that Pater's sentence "deliberately
frustrates the reader's natural desire to organize the particulars it
offers" and the dynamics of reading are persistently referred to as a
"strategy" or as an "effect."21 The same self-confidence is present in
the felicitous formulation of Fish's own critical procedure. The read-
ing-stories he tells are true because they are given to us by an author
in full control of his language. By tracing back the meandering thread
19 Fish, p. I25.
20 Fish, pp. 125, I26, I33.
21 ". .. what makes problematical sense as a statement makes perfect sense as a
strategy, as an action made upon a reader" (Fish, p. 124); "In my account of read-
ing . . . the temporary adoption of these inappropriate strategies is itself a response
to the strategy of an author; and the resulting mistakes are part of the experience
provided by that author's language and therefore part of the meaning" (p. 144),
etc.
90o NEW LITERARY HISTORY
22 The examples are amplified rather than contradicted by the other examples
from Pater and Plato.
LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE: A COMMENTARY igi
charged with the gravest sins in Hell, including the betrayal of their
benefactors, the readers. But the passages that have been selected
assert the impossibility of passing judgment because the evidence of
guilt, either by Scriptural authority or by the inner voice of conscience,
cannot be ascertained. Within the inner logic of Fish's argument, the
examples thus reveal the utter bewilderment of the author before his
own text: did he, or did he not know what he was saying? No one
can tell, neither reader nor author. The author is ahead of the reader
only in the knowledge of his impossibility, but, by his very utterance,
he reduces the reader to the same condition of ignorance. It is doubtful
whether the conveyance of this negative insight could still be called an
act, let alone a process. And it is equally doubtful whether this no-act
can be represented by a geometrical line ("verbal string") or by a
narrative that lays claim to mimetic veracity. Neither reading nor
writing resemble action; both tend to fuse in their common deviation
from referential models, whether they be things, acts, or feelings. The
ideal reader is the author himself, because he does not share the
illusions of the naive reader-in this case Stanley Fish-about the
writer's authority. Fish's own text infers this, although it reduces his
methodological claims to nought. To place Plato's Phaedrus at the
center of an essay on the rhetoric of reading, to read it correctly as a
radical deconstruction of the truth of all literary texts, and then to go
on to claim of one's own critical discourse that it will "chart and project
the developing response" in a "truly objective way" is making things
almost too easy for the critical commentator.
Or is it perhaps a not-so-naive gesture of self-defense? Stanley Fish
has more than glimpsed the implications of the Phaedrus, of the poetic
texts he quotes, and of his own critique of thematic and structural
semanticism. Reflecting apologetically on the one-sidedness of his
examples, he remarks that "perhaps literature is what disturbs our
sense of self-sufficiency, personal and linguistic," a formulation that,
in the final analysis, spells the end of criticism as a scientific mode of
discourse. But he immediately retreats from such implications: "the
result [of thus defining literature] would probably be more a reflection
of personal psychological need than of a universally true aesthetic." 23
The only need that can be at play here is that of not seeing the universal
negativity of what then can no longer be called an aesthetics of litera-
ture, and this need is neither personal nor psychological. Later in the
article, the same unavoidable threat of semantic nihilism is again
perceived: "Nothing is [the meaning]. Perhaps, then, the word mean-
23 Fish, p. I47.
192 NEW LITERARY HISTORY
24
ing should also be discarded. . . , But this speculative moment is
also at once repressed by substituting a regressive notion of unmediated
"experience" for meaning and by a curiously primitivistic statement
about experience being "immediately compromised the moment you
say anything about it," a pseudoelegiac theme which, despite its
assumed hostility towards language, has generated even more words
than the wars of Troy.
The systematic avoidance of reading is not a time- or place-bound
phenomenon characteristic of American formalist criticism in the early
seventies. The double movement of revelation and recoil will always
be inherent in the nature of a genuine critical discourse; its presence
in these essays bears witness to their vitality. It can appear in infinitely
varied versions and this diversity creates the possibility of a history of
critical trends and movements. In the case of most of these articles,
the particular obstacle that interferes with reading stems from a wish-
ful confusion between the analytical rigor of the exegetic procedure
and the epistemological authority of the ensuing results.
YALEUNIVERSITY
24 Fish, p. 160.